‘My apologies, sir,’ continued the captain. ‘Sergeant Jollan is a proud daughter of Mordian. But she is correct – you are trying to cheat us. And I do not appreciate the implicit threat of the pistol in front of you.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ghent, raising two fingers.

  Four gangers stepped out from the rusting equipment, drum-fed autoguns held at waist height as they advanced.

  ‘Then let’s make the threat explicit. Just so you can appreciate it.’

  ‘Don’t,’ warned the captain, as Jollan’s hand curled around her laspistol.

  ‘Listen to the captain, lass, you won’t win this one,’ said Ghent. ‘See, we might not wear the skull-and-wings, but we’re still Cadians. By the time an intake sergeant spat in your face and told you to stand up straight, we’d been doing live-fire drills from age nine.’

  Ghent reached down under the desk, pulled up a blue ceramic bottle of leolac and pulled the cork.

  ‘Now,’ said Ghent. ‘Shall we toast your victory, and return to the question of price?’

  Clang.

  Twelve.

  Corks popped, bouncing off the ceiling and landing on the long table. A group of artillery staff officers were trying to hit the chandelier. They cheered as one missile lodged in the hanging strands of crystal, and the lieutenant who’d fired it celebrated by pulling directly off the bottle.

  To Colour Sergeant Jarran Kell, it sounded like the hollow pop of mortar tubes.

  He walked down the table, passing a group of Vostroyans snare-drumming the wooden surface with their fists. In their centre, a lieutenant worked her way along a line of blue-glowing shot glasses. The Vostroyans burst into a cheer as she finished the last, triumphantly crushing the glass in her bionic fist.

  A captain of the Eighth approached Kell singing ‘Flower of Cadia’, and pushed a flute of sparkling vin into his hand. Kell took it and raised it in a toast, then discreetly ditched it on a sideboard. He picked a cap off the table and deposited it on the head of an intelligence corporal – someone’s aide – who lay face down on the table with his arm wrapped around a leolac bottle. His fellows had kindly decorated him with a collection of flatware.

  Kell took a right turn and put a hand on the double door-knob, but stopped when he heard the call of, ‘Creed! Where’s Creed?’

  He turned and waved them off.

  ‘We want the Lord Castellan!’ shouted another. ‘Speech!’

  It became a chant then: ‘Speech! Speech! Speech!’

  ‘Soon,’ he shouted back, knowing that in an hour, most would be so drunk they wouldn’t remember to ask again. ‘After the night’s work is done – someone has to manage the victory.’

  As the cheer rose, he disappeared through the blast-proof doors before it became quiet enough for more demands.

  ‘Those idiots are still at it, I see,’ said Ursarkar Creed.

  The commander of the Cadian Eighth, saviour of Tyrok Fields, and Lord Castellan of Cadia bent over a desk collaged with documents and maps. Empty sacra tumblers served as paperweights, and an ashtray fashioned from an Earthshaker shell smouldered with half a dozen cigar-butts. The room – so pristine when Creed had moved into it – reeked of tobacco.

  ‘The Archenemy is in retreat, pulling off-world,’ Kell answered. ‘You told them to enjoy themselves.’

  ‘I said to enjoy it while it lasts, there’s a difference.’ Creed turned red-rimmed eyes back to the charts. ‘I know Shock Troopers can’t do anything in moderation, but I didn’t mean for them to undermine readiness. This isn’t over.’

  ‘So a night of venting heat will be good for morale, especially if this isn’t over.’

  Creed grunted. ‘Still, move reveille up an hour tomorrow morning. They can have their fun tonight, but I want them to feel it.’

  Kell smirked, the closest he got to a smile, and handed over the data-slate tucked under his arm. ‘Report from South Primus. The Volscani are holding on. They don’t seem to be running with the mutants and irregular cultist militias.’

  ‘Under all the spikes and blood runes, they’re still Guardsmen,’ mused Creed. ‘That’s what makes them dangerous. Any word from Admiral Quarren and the picket fleet?’

  ‘No, sir. But he should have established his blockade at the Eye of Terror by now.’

  ‘Let’s hope that I’m being paranoid.’ Creed leaned backwards with his hands on the small of his back.

  ‘It’s true what the war council says, you know. The forces that hit us were commensurate with previous Black Crusades. Larger, even.’

  ‘Not you too, Jarran.’ Creed shook his head.

  ‘It is possible he was killed in the Eye, fighting some other warlord.’ He saw Creed’s look and added: ‘It’s happened before.’

  ‘You can’t believe that.’

  ‘We picked up signals saying so. Good quality intercepts. Hard decryptions, definitely look authentic.’

  ‘Tell me this, if this was the main Archenemy attack, where are the Terminators? Where’re the waves of Black Legion, the warp engines? We’ve had cultists and mutants, Traitor Astartes in tactical roles, but you’re telling me the Archenemy leadership spent centuries building this force then never landed here in person?’

  Through the door, a drunken chorus was singing ‘Flower of Cadia’ again, and Creed had to shout to make himself heard over the din.

  ‘No one can explain that to me. Not any of them. Not the Navy, not the Aeronautica, not Militarum intelligence or the Scholastica Psykana or the demigods of the Adeptus Astartes. None of them can tell me the one Throne-damned thing I want to know.’

  He threw his cigar-butt on the desk in frustration, smearing a debris field of ash across a chart of the Rossvar Mountains. Then he slammed both fists onto the desktop and shouted the last three words:

  ‘Where is Abaddon?’

  Clang.

  Thirteen.

  The ship emerged from the immaterium with a noise like a child being torn from the womb. A moment of blood, a primal experience of a creature first feeling the cold air and pull of gravity – sucking atmosphere into its lungs before screaming it out in pain and confusion.

  Except in this case it was not the ship that screamed, it was the material world around it. The very atoms rent apart, bleeding indescribable colours.

  Dravura Morkath watched through the crystal windows as the vessel she had tamed for her master spilled forth into realspace.

  The sudden shock of translation hit the bridge crew, already overtaxed in serving the ancient vessel. Beastmen vomited. One opened its mouth and bit down on its own arm hard enough to fracture it.

  A Mechanicum adept at a fire-control station suffered a compounding error in his synthetic brain. His logic chains – rerouted so drastically to make sense of the pandemonium of the Eye – jammed as it encountered the silent order of realspace.

  He collapsed to the deck, the smoke of frying neural circuits wafting from his tear-ducts.

  Morkath saw his thoughts as he died, his stream of consciousness surrounding his augmented cranium like the halo on the fresco of an Imperial saint.

  All beings thought differently. Some of the beastmen on the bridge projected impressionistic swirls of ink around their heads, full of despair. Others expressed their conscious with jagged-edged panic.

  This adept, in his death throes, still thought in the blinking typeface of a cathode screen as his brain ticked down like a dying chrono.

  Back to station. I can get back to station, lord. I can…

  Pain, so much…

  Do I live?

  I can…

  …still…

  …serve…

  ‘Children of the Eye,’ growled a voice behind her. ‘Not meant for realspace.’

  Morkath turned to look upon her Warmaster, ensuring her mind did not search the cloud of thoughts swirling around him like an aura of flame. Her master did not always want her to see what resided there, and neither did she.

  Morkath bowed to her lord.

  Abaddon. The Warmaster of Chaos, right hand of Horus, Master of the Black Legion and the being fated to kill the False Emperor. The man who had pulled Morkath out of the dark as a child, and made her what she was – though what that was, exactly, remained a subject of whispers.

  The Warmaster sat in an ebony throne too large for his enormous frame. What manner of creature required such a seat – one large enough to dwarf the Warmaster, even in his battle plate – was, like so much aboard the Blackstone Fortress Will of Eternity, beyond Morkath’s understanding.

  Yet the space around the Warmaster was not empty. Daemon-things flitted there, darting and howling. Folding in upon themselves in geometric shapes or bursting into flames that devoured their essence as some stray emotion set them ablaze.

  Morkath closed her eyes and willed herself not to see the motes of warp-things. To screen them out, and see only the revered face of the being she was lucky to call father.

  ‘The stars are different this time,’ he said.

  ‘Different, my lord?’ Morkath asked, opening her eyes to see the Warmaster without his shroud of parasitic spirits.

  ‘I remember.’ Abaddon’s head, twice as large as that of a mortal, did not regard her as he spoke, yet even so, the low rumble of his voice rattled through her. ‘I recall how the stars looked when we exited the Eye last time.’

  ‘During the Gothic War,’ Morkath said.

  ‘Yes, before we took you in, foundling. I remember where every star was fixed, then. It was the same. The same constellations, unchanging from the first time we exited the Eye to the last. Twelve times, the same starscape.’

  ‘But now they have changed?’

  ‘New stars,’ growled Abaddon. ‘Different stars. Moving… a fleet.’

  ‘Contacts! Contacts!’ bleated a Mechanicum sensory officer. She stood permanently wired into a pit, slick organic cables – bunching and relaxing like the tentacles of an undersea octopod – connecting her exposed cranium with eight psykers floating in fluid sacs. ‘Imperial fleet! Bearing eight-two-six. Two thousand five hundred miles distance. Emperor class! Mars class! Vengeance class!’

  ‘Reading ship silhouettes,’ intoned Cacadius Siron. He was a former Alpha Legionnaire – now Abaddon’s intelligence chief. Before him, projection lasers danced in the air, sketching wire-frame outlines of Imperial vessels. ‘Tentative identifications: Might of the Faithful, Emperor class. Final Blow, Mars class. Duke Lurstophan, Dauntless class. Abridal’s Glory, Gothic class. They are from multiple battlefleets – Scarus, Agrippina, Corona.’

  ‘A combined fleet,’ said Abaddon. ‘Consolidated due to casualties.’

  ‘Our opening moves must have damaged their fleet assets even more heavily than we estimated,’ Morkath said.

  ‘With the remnants split chasing the Vengeful Spirit away from Cadia,’ added Siron. He seemed ready to speak again, but the Warmaster cut him off.

  ‘Meaning, the Gate is open.’

  ‘To Cadia!’ roared a beastman, raising its clenched fists. Across the command deck, crew howled, crowed, bellowed, gurgled, ululated. A thousand mutant throats screaming the elation that came with an achievement millennia in the making. Feet and hooves stamped the decking. ‘To Cadia! To Cadia!’

  Under the noise, only Morkath heard the Warmaster growl.

  ‘A step,’ he said. ‘It is only a step. The Crimson Path awaits.’

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  A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

  First published in Great Britain in 2025.

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  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

  Cover illustration by Dan Watson.

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  R S Wilt, Final Deployment