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  The serpent ignored the commotion and released Oskar, turning its quartered skull towards Vesper. It lunged forwards and bit down twice, once on her arm and once on her neck.

  Lalique died next, trying to shield Ivalee from the monster’s attack. She howled as the venoms took her, and the serpent beast descended upon Ivalee.

  Vivyen closed her eyes, but heard the girl’s pitiful shrieks of pain over the screams coming from the crowd...

  Vivyen’s eyes snapped open.

  Those were screams as terrified as her own.

  People were running and crackling bolts of lightning exploded throughout the chamber, arcing from its giant columns and girders. She caught a glimpse of a grey giant in scorched armour as he threw himself at a tall robot with only one arm. She lost sight of him as the lethal serpent reared up in front of her, its bloody gullet open wide.

  ‘Please, no!’ she cried as it whipped forward.

  A hand flashed out and caught the serpent around its neck, its fangs snapping shut a hair’s breadth away.

  Furious, it twisted and bit Vivyen’s saviour’s forearm.

  Alivia slammed its head down on the packing crate altar.

  The monster thrashed, its tail lashing like a bullwhip.

  Alivia jammed the barrel of the Ferlach serpenta against its pinned skull and pulled the trigger.

  Its head exploded in a welter of blood and bone.

  ‘You don’t get to hurt my daughter,’ she said.

  The pain was incredible, like nothing Alivia had felt in all her long life. It coursed around her body like a white-hot electric charge, burning as it went. Her inhuman metabolism, numinous and all but immortal, fought the serpent’s kiss, a venom born in cosmic fire.

  The sounds of screaming and gunfire faded out.

  Her vision greyed and the muscles in her legs spasmed as her synapses fired crazily. She held onto the crates, purpled bile retching up from her gut.

  ‘Mama!’ cried a voice next to her.

  She looked up, but could only see a blurred shadow. She knew the voice, but couldn’t place it.

  ‘Rebekah? Is that you?’ she gasped, her throat feeling like it was closing up. ‘Milcah?’

  ‘It’s me, mama. It’s Vivyen.’

  Alivia nodded and a gush of purple-black vomit erupted from her. Her chest heaved like a bellows-press and yet more nightmarish venom was expelled, a squirting flood that spilled over the crates.

  Alivia blinked tears from her eyes as she heard sickening cracks and the wet meat sound of flesh detaching from bone. She heaved a breath, one rancid with necrosis and raw newness. She was weaker than she could ever remember, barely able to keep a grip on the serpenta.

  Alivia wrapped an arm around Vivyen, her poisoned flesh a bloated mottled mass of purple and yellow. She kept her daughter pulled tight to her breast, keeping her back to the horror unfolding upon the altar.

  The envenomed children were changing.

  Remade by an invisible sculptor.

  Transforming.

  Swollen with immaterial toxins, their bodies split and cracked, jerking with unnatural vigour to an unseen design. The empyrean imparted renewed ambition to their flesh, meat running molten from the bone and melding in unholy union.

  A second coming, an immaculate birth of nightmare.

  It grew swiftly, sculpting the offering of dead flesh into a form both wondrous and repulsive; gracile limbs bearing supple flesh of ivory and mauve. Glossy and smooth, clawed and feline of eye, it was horned, yet beautiful. Its wet tongue promised heights of pleasure and undreamed torments in equal measure, a succubus nurtured in the womb of a dying race and fathered by forbidden desires.

  A daemon.

  And yet it was unfinished, a work in progress, its metamorphosis incomplete. It limped towards Alivia, one leg too slender, its remade flesh and bone only half-formed. It reached for her with chitinous claws of purpled ebon.

  Alivia lifted the serpenta and pulled the trigger.

  Her bullets tore through the newborn daemon, carving lambent furrows through its body. It shrieked, in pleasure and pain both. Phosphor-bright ichor spilled from its wounds, yet it kept coming, moving in stuttering, unfinished pain.

  Its black eyes promised an ecstatic death.

  ‘Your flesh is promised,’ it said. ‘Give it to me.’

  The serpenta’s hammer snapped down on an empty chamber.

  ‘You want it?’ said Alivia. ‘Take it. It’s yours.’

  Severian twisted the burning arm of the Thallax around its segmented plastron. Fire crackled along the weapon’s length. The thing inside was fighting hard and even with only one arm, it wasn’t giving up.

  It rammed a shoulder into him and he went with the blow, dropping and rolling, pulling it with him. The Thallax toppled, and Severian wrenched its arm back. Metal buckled and tore. The arm came loose.

  Severian rose to one knee and jammed the flaring end of the barrel into its helmet. A blazing plume of light engulfed its conical headpiece. It ran like heated wax, and boiling amniotic fluids gushed out in a stinking rush.

  Beneath the cracked visor, a fleshless skull screamed.

  Encased in a bronze headpiece of melting wires and invasive neural spikes drilled through the bone, the Thallax spasmed as its life finally ended.

  Severian sprang away, revolted by the sight.

  His threat awareness told him there was nothing left alive that could hurt him. The Thallax were down, as were the few mortals who’d been stupid enough to face him.

  Severian turned to where Alivia had gone.

  And saw he was wrong.

  There was something that could still hurt him.

  The daemon had claimed Alivia.

  Its claws dug deep, and she felt its warp-stuff bleed into her, taking the final piece of what the living cadaver had promised it.

  Their union was one of pain, but also one of promise.

  The powers of those possessed were myriad, and the temptation to wield them burned hot in Alivia’s breast. For all the cunning wrought into her kind’s making, they were none of them above such bargains, nor above mortal ambition or physical desires.

  They were, after all was said and done, still human.

  But Alivia had become so much more than that.

  She was a mother.

  Alivia let the daemon in, let its essence consume her.

  Then slammed the door behind it.

  ‘No way out,’ she said.

  Severian walked slowly towards the makeshift altar, a blade in each hand. Alivia floated alongside the wretched architect of this slaughter, but where chains supported his paste-white form, Alivia needed nothing so prosaic to remain aloft.

  Her outline wavered in the air, like identical picter negatives placed fractionally out of sync and trying to realign. Two beings struggling to occupy one body.

  Like the corpse of Serghar Targost aboard the Vengeful Spirit, Alivia Sureka was now host to a warp beast.

  But she was fighting it.

  He saw pleading behind her eyes, a restlessness beneath her numinous skin that threatened to erupt at any moment.

  ‘Get. Her. Away.’

  The words were forced out from behind clenched teeth.

  And in that instant, Severian understood the truth of what he was seeing. The battle within Alivia wasn’t her fighting to hold on to her humanity.

  It was the thing inside struggling to get out.

  She saw his understanding and nodded.

  Severian bent his back and made a quarter turn.

  His right arm snapped forward and Proximo Tarchon’s gladius spun through the air. It buried itself in Alivia’s heart.

  The young girl they’d come to save screamed, calling her name as if that might somehow bring her back.

  Alivia fell to the a
ltar as a body of dark smoke calved from her flesh. Its connection to the warp severed, the scraps of the daemon claimed the nearest living soul to bear its form.

  But that rotten soul was singularly unable to host it.

  Shargali-Shi’s body bloated as the daemon dug deeper and ever deeper into him, trawling his flesh for the strength to match its need.

  All it found was a hollow shell, empty and useless.

  He felt its terror as reality prepared to expel it.

  Shargali-Shi could only wail his despair as he convulsed on his chains, jerking like a thing made entirely from broken bones. The daemon’s dying geometries were pulling him in a hundred directions at once.

  His skin was drum-tight, stretched to the limits of its tolerance; his mouth became a distended void as cartilage tore and sinew snapped.

  Then he broke, his body exploding as it released its captive, and his wasted fragments were incinerated by the empyreal fire his death had unleashed.

  Alivia opened her eyes, staring up at a number of gently swinging chains hanging from the high domed ceiling. Motes of fading light clung to them, drifting slowly downwards like the embers of a dying fire.

  She groaned in pain. Her chest hurt.

  Her whole body hurt.

  Vivyen’s head was buried in the hollow of her collarbone and Alivia felt hot tears wetting her skin. Vivyen was alive.

  And that made all the pain in the world worthwhile.

  ‘Vivyen?’ asked Alivia.

  ‘Mama,’ was Vivyen’s only reply. ‘I knew you’d come. The book told me, but I knew anyway.’

  ‘The book?’

  ‘Madame Ghost Snake,’ said Vivyen.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘As good a name as any for someone who ought to be dead,’ said Severian.

  Alivia forced herself up onto one elbow.

  The Luna Wolf sat on the edge of the crates, wiping her blood from the gladius he’d thrown. Alivia winced as she relived the pain of it shearing through her breastbone to her heart. She looked over her shoulder. Other than the three of them, the chamber was empty.

  ‘That was a good throw,’ she said.

  ‘Why aren’t you dead?’ asked Severian. ‘That serpent bit you and I know I split your heart.’

  ‘I thought you said the world was more interesting with some secrets left in it,’ said Alivia.

  Severian grinned and offered her a hand up. ‘True enough. Very well, Alivia Sureka, keep your secrets for now, but Malcador is going to want to hear them.’

  Alivia took Severian’s hand, not wishing to sour the moment with how little she cared for the Sigillite’s wants. She levered herself into a sitting position. Her body had been traumatised on every level, physically, mentally and spiritually, abused beyond anything she’d imagined possible to survive.

  Her hand slid over her chest, feeling the clean cut in the fabric where Severian’s gladius had penetrated. There was a scar there, of course there was, but it was meaningless next to the scars on her psyche. She would wake screaming for years, perhaps forever, but she kept that horror at bay for now. Vivyen needed her to be strong.

  Nightmares could wait.

  ‘I told you that weapon had shed potent blood,’ she said.

  ‘So you did.’

  Alivia swept her gaze around the chamber.

  ‘Are they all dead?’

  ‘They will be,’ promised Severian.

  ‘Then let’s go home, Vivyen,’ said Alivia.

  AFTERWORD

  Okay, I know what you’re probably thinking – War Without End is a slightly glib title, when you consider that the Horus Heresy series has been blazing along for over ten years now. It’s important to remember that before the first handful of novels were published, all we really had was a few thousand words of much-loved and oft-quoted background text from Warhammer 40,000 loremaster Alan Merrett. He covered the main battles, the broad strokes, the stuff you needed to know in order to make sense of the whole thing.

  But that wasn’t the full story. It was the beginning of something much bigger.

  The Horus Heresy is the greatest war in the history of mankind, and every one of the Space Marine Legions has a role to play in it. While not all were active right from the start, after Isstvan V and the Dropsite Massacre the number of plot threads and story arcs exploded, spreading from the single nexus that began the seven years of the Age of Darkness. However, as with everything in this material universe of ours, that which has a beginning must also, logically, have an ending. We’ll come to that shortly, at least in the context of this afterword...

  The stories in this anthology cover a seemingly disparate and unconnected series of events, but if you look a little closer there are plenty of subtle links between them, and hints to what is coming next. I can, for example, confirm that the major villains and the unlikely hero of the next Horus Heresy novel have all appeared in the last few hundred pages.

  And it’s also no coincidence that we began and ended with the ‘Serpent Gods’ of Molech...

  All of these tales were originally published either in the event-exclusives The Imperial Truth and Sedition’s Gate, or the short collections Death and Defiance and Blades of the Traitor. However, one of the most obvious differences is the order in which they are presented here – somewhere between chronological and thematic, to highlight the crossovers and interconnectivity, and giving more context than perhaps they had before. ‘Allegiance’ followed by ‘Daemonology’, for example, gives two very different but direct continuations of the novel Scars. Similarly, the events of ‘By the Lion’s Command’ run slightly ahead of the stories set in and around Imperium Secundus, while ‘Black Oculus’ slides almost enigmatically into the dreamlike space between Angel Exterminatus and the Battle of Tallarn.

  I’ve spoken many times before about the reasons why these sorts of stories are so important to the Horus Heresy novel series, and why they’re so rewarding for the authors to write, for us to edit and for everyone to read. Aside from all the shooty-death-kill-in-space you could ever want and more awesome characters than you can shake a fistful of dice at, it’s about continuity. Well crafted, authentic feeling drama doesn’t just spring fully formed from the pages of a sourcebook.

  Also, a good portion of the editors’ work is not only to spot what should go into a specific story, but also what shouldn’t. Like a well timed cut-to-black in your favourite film or TV series, the blank spaces and the unknowns left by the prose are often as poignant and exciting as anything written on the page, and by the power of their omission we get a sense of a much larger universe that we can tease beforehand or revisit afterwards.

  Why didn’t the events of ‘Sermon of Exodus’ go into the beginning of The Damnation of Pythos? Because it wasn’t strictly relevant to the Space Marine point of view, but it certainly adds a lot of flavour to the cults of Davin that feature so heavily in the final acts. Why didn’t Horus corrupt Eristede Kell at the end of Nemesis? Because time had to pass for his absence to be felt, for the mystery to marinate in our collective subconscious and make the payoff that much more exciting.

  Why didn’t ‘Howl of the Hearthworld’ reach any kind of final conclusion? What happened to Vulkan’s arsenal after ‘Artefacts’? When was ‘Hands of the Emperor’ set? How long does Fabius have left, even with his ‘Chirurgeon’?

  Well, I don’t want to spoil all the surprises for you.

  One of the questions that people ask all the time is ‘When will the Horus Heresy actually end?’ – at one Black Library Live event, someone even asked me to state, on microphone, on the record, how many books there would be in total. I think I mumbled something about some in-universe dates on the timeline, before arriving at the rough conclusion that Mark of Calth was roughly halfway through the series.

  In my regular chats with Forge World’s Alan Bligh, we often pull out our bullet-point list
of ‘Things That Need to Happen Before Horus Gets to Terra’, and it’s a list that we will add to, whenever necessary. Both Black Library and Forge World are working hard to progress through the timeline: while we tell tales of mighty champions, infernal beasts and grim battles, they provide a lot more detail on the war and the armies that fought it. We are two sides of the same shiny lodge medal.

  Having had more time to think about it, the practical answer to the question is that the Horus Heresy will end when every point on that list has been crossed off. The stories in this anthology covered about nine of them directly, and paved the way for many more.

  But a more cryptic response is: Be careful what you wish for.

  Is the end in sight? Of course it is. You know how all this turns out, and behind the curtain we now know exactly how many books there will be.

  Are there going to be any more surprises along the way? Oh, you’d better believe it. The original aim of this series was to turn the popular misconception of the ‘facts’ on its head, and we have absolutely no intention of doing anything less.

  Just you wait. The light of Imperium Secundus is fading, and night will soon fall.

  And then things are going to get ugly.

  Laurie Goulding

  September 2015

  About the Authors

  David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos. He also writes the Yarrick series, consisting of the novella Chains of Golgotha and the novels Imperial Creed and The Pyres of Armageddon. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universes. He has also written several short stories set in the Age of Sigmar. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Betrayer and The First Heretic, as well as the novella Aurelian and the audio drama Butcher’s Nails, for the same series. He also wrote the popular Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Helsreach, the Abaddon novel The Talon of Horus, the Grey Knights novel The Emperor’s Gift and numerous short stories. He lives and works in Northern Ireland.