Black Library Celebration 2024 by Various authors

Author:Various authors
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science fiction: space opera, Science fiction: military, Dark fantasy, Contemporary horror and ghost stories, Crime and mystery: private investigator / amateur detectives, Crime and mystery: hard-boiled crime, noir fiction
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2023-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

HORUS RISING

by Dan Abnett

His dream for humanity accomplished, Emperor hands over the reins of power to his Warmaster, Horus, and heads back to Terra. But will such incredible power corrupt Horus?

Find this title, and many others, on blacklibrary.com

PAIN ENGINE

Chris Thursten

The path begins at the Feast of Keening Razors.

The brutalities and death games of the arena followed a pattern of escalation – lethal competition orchestrated with an artist’s eye and an epicure’s palate. Terrorised alien captives were harried into the path of scything Hellions; these same were then dragged to the ground by the impossible acrobatics of the wyches of the Razor. My archon, Torakhis, bade his Trueborn forward and then halted the order, his attention arrested by the weapon brought forth by his rival, Raidmaster Nahaerian.

Her contribution to the Feast was a single combatant – a Pain Engine, hunchbacked and barbed, whose glowering aspect drew all eyes inward. It was a singular thing, redolent with suffering, and though it is rare for a haemonculus to acknowledge the mastery of another’s work, I did so. Nahaerian’s herald stepped forward atop her twin-decked barge and projected a single word:

SEETHE.

The gathered throng erupted and the fray that followed was a paean to violence. My archon shuddered at the affront of it, but he could not deny the Engine’s potency and nor could I. To the craftless, this was a single moment of overwhelming ecstasy. To me, it was but a crack of light through a doorway. The path began at the Feast of Keening Razors, and I felt all the joy and agony of fate diverted.

Now, centuries later, I feel nothing.

I descend the final step and face a wall engraved with the master’s sigil. Aside from that jagged mark, its surface is smooth and flat, a slab of dark metal that pinches across the twisting pathway like a suture.

Why do I not sense it?

This is a lost, lightless place, a cavity scarcely fit to die in. Yet it is the privilege of the haemonculus to curate sensation beyond such mundanity, to trace the unseen patterns of a murderous universe and bend them to new purpose. A teeming array of sensor-grafts and spliced nerves blossom upon my palms and I direct them to the sigil – and then beyond, to an orbital ridge, molecule-thin, that indicates the presence of a hidden aperture.

Where is the agony that made thralls of Halfborn and archons alike?

My senses bared, I strain beyond the portal for the soul-scent of the Pain Engine called Seethe, whose secrets I have pursued across a graveyard’s fill of lifetimes. Nothing.

Yet.

I know that I am upon the final threshold. Knowledge, cruelly won, has permitted me to undertake this last journey into the black depths of Commorragh. At every step, a tithe has been levied – and I have spent lavishly, goading my followers forward into the myriad horrors that protect the hidden paths of the haemonculi. This is, after all, the expense for which they were spared.

It has gratified me, in the course of the descent, to elevate this grim transaction to poetry.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.