The Magos Read online

  SUGGESTED READING ORDER

  The books in brackets are provided for context.

  They reflect the author’s suggested reading order and do not appear in this volume.

  PESTILENCE

  MASTER IMUS’ TRANSGRESSION

  REGIA OCCULTA

  (XENOS)

  MISSING IN ACTION

  (MALLEUS)

  BACKCLOTH FOR A CROWN ADDITIONAL

  THE STRANGE DEMISE OF TITUS ENDOR

  (HERETICUS)

  THE CURIOSITY

  PLAYING PATIENCE

  (RAVENOR)

  THORN WISHES TALON

  (RAVENOR RETURNED)

  (RAVENOR ROGUE)

  GARDENS OF TYCHO

  THE KEELER IMAGE

  PERIHELION

  THE MAGOS

  (PARIAH)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Suggested Reading Order

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Introduction

  PESTILENCE

  MASTER IMUS’ TRANSGRESSION

  REGIA OCCULTA

  MISSING IN ACTION

  BACKCLOTH FOR A CROWN ADDITIONAL

  THE STRANGE DEMISE OF TITUS ENDOR

  THE CURIOSITY

  PLAYING PATIENCE

  THORN WISHES TALON

  GARDENS OF TYCHO

  THE KEELER IMAGE

  PERIHELION

  THE MAGOS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Chronology

  About the Author

  A Black Library Publication

  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.

  INTRODUCTION

  Funny thing, it turns out you can write a book by accident.

  Having written, you know, a… few books, I don’t expect novels to take me by surprise. Novels are large creatures. They’re like big and badly coordinated houseguests, who turn up and live with you for months at a time, sometimes outstaying their welcome, so that when they finally leave, you’re happy to see the back of them, what with them keeping you up late, night after night, and leaving their plot threads in your sink. They also plan their visits months or even years in advance: at any point in the last decade, I could have told you, in order, what books I’d be writing this year, next year, and sometimes the year after that. They line up, take a number, and then go and sit in the waiting room, glaring at me, surrounded by their carrier bags full of reference books, clutching their lists of problems and demands.

  Once in a while, they turn up without warning. That’s fine. In fact, suddenly accommodating the unexpected is one of the real pleasures of being a freelance writer. It happens all the time in comics (my other job). I know what regular work I’ve got, but I often get asked to write a guest issue or filler issue at short notice to save a deadline, and suddenly I’m plunging into something, say Green Lantern or the Justice League, that wasn’t in my head at all. However, an issue of a comic is an easier, smaller beast to find a spare room for.

  On several occasions, I’ve been asked to write a book that, until I got the phone call, I’d had no thought of writing. Instead of contemplating a novel for months before getting to write it, stewing the ideas and ingredients in my head, I have to find my way into it without any time to psyche myself up first. You get fresh results that way. It happened with Fell Cargo (phone conversation precis: ‘Can you write a novel about pirates real quick?’). It also happened with Xenos, the first Eisenhorn novel. My Black Library editor mailed me a bunch of reference material for the (then) forthcoming Inquisitor RPG, believing the lovely art and images might be useful 40K inspiration for my work on the Gaunt’s Ghosts novels. I was so inspired, I asked if I could write an inquisitor novel and, within a week, I was. I just jumped right in, and worked out what the hell I was doing as I went along.

  That was 2001. Sixteen years and seven inquisitor novels later…

  So I knew novels could be unexpected. And I also knew that novels sometimes turn into something completely different during the actual writing. I even knew I was capable of rewriting a book from scratch in a matter of weeks (the notorious ‘backup’ failure of Honour Guard).

  But actually by accident…?

  Turns out that can happen too.

  The Eisenhorn books, and their successors, the Ravenor and Bequin books, have been very popular. What started as a spontaneous bit of fun with Xenos has grown to be a trilogy of trilogies, an interlinked and epic cycle that will conclude with Penitent and Pandaemonium, the last two parts of the Bequin series (and yes, I am going to write them soon. They’ve both taken a number. They’re sitting in the waiting room).

  Along the way, I have written a bunch of short stories featuring those characters. These shorts have often been produced to accompany the publication or new edition of an Inquisitor novel, something new to get people in the mood. Some of the stories (‘Missing In Action’, ‘Backcloth For A Crown Additional’ and ‘Playing Patience’) have become well known, because they are fixtures in the omnibus editions of Eisenhorn and Ravenor. About ten years ago, I thought about collecting all the shorts into an anthology, a companion volume to the trilogies. I thought completists might like to have all the Inquisitor short stories gathered in one volume that could sit on their shelves alongside the novels. It became clear that to make a collection of worthwhile length, I’d need to write new stories, and I began to do that, writing ‘Master Imus’ Transgression’ and ‘The Strange Demise Of Titus Endor’. Then I got stuck, on a short story called ‘Nathan Inshabel on Elvara Cardinal’ (ask me about that sometime), and
the anthology never happened. ‘Master Imus’ and ‘Titus Endor’ were turned into audio dramas. The former has never been published in its original prose form.

  This summer, my Black Library editor Nick Kyme mentioned the idea of an anthology again. Time had passed, and the number of stories that could be included had increased. All we now needed to make a nice, book-length edition was a couple of new stories, or maybe a novella.

  I got to work, intending to write a novella that would sit chronologically between the stories in the collection and Pariah, the first Bequin book. I took a look at the stories ready for inclusion, and worked out the best running order, and in doing so, suggested to Nick that there were three other old short stories that might be nice to include. These weren’t Inquisitor stories at all: they didn’t feature Eisenhorn or Ravenor or anyone else from those books. But they were stories I was very fond of, and I felt they would fit. They were all detective stories, procedurals, and they were also ‘domestic 40K’, which is the joke term we use to describe the Eisenhorn books – stories set AWAY from the battlefronts of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, stories about the planets and cities and people that the wars of 40K are trying to protect. If those three stories were going to be collected together anywhere, then an Eisenhorn anthology was the ideal place, if nothing else because they were examples of me exploring the writing method that I use in the Inquisitor books.

  Then the accident happened. I began to think of ways of obliquely connecting most of the old stories, even the non-Eisenhorn ones, to the new novella. This appealed – rather than the stories being unrelated vignettes and incidents from Eisenhorn’s career, they could be brought together by the novella to make a volume that was satisfyingly linked by themes and ideas.

  And the novella was no longer a novella. I think I realised that around the 20,000 word mark. I warned Nick it was ‘running a bit long’. He told me to carry on regardless. Three weeks later, I had a full-length novel. That’s The Magos, which forms the last part of this volume. It’s a brand new, entirely original Eisenhorn novel. It happened by accident, refusing to admit it was a novel even while I was writing it. It wraps the old stories in this anthology up in its arms and acts as a (major) prologue to Pariah.

  It also, contrary to plan, becomes the entirely unintentional fourth novel in the Eisenhorn trilogy. Like I said, accidents happen.

  So, this book contains old stories you may have read before, stories that have not been in print before, stories that you might not think of as belonging here, and a brand new Eisenhorn novel. Even if you have read (or heard, as audios) the old stories in this book before, I suggest you don’t skip them. When you reach The Magos, the effort of revisiting them will be rewarded.

  While the stories here run in roughly chronological order, I have deliberately spaced a couple out to provide variety and contrast. For purists, I have written up a chronology to show the order in which they happen and how they relate to the novels of the Inquisitor cycle. But that’s just the order in which they took place, not the order in which they are best read.

  I hope you enjoy this unexpected addition to the Eisenhorn canon. If you’ve read Pariah, you’ll know what happens next, but there are still some major surprises in here. The Magos is not a ‘disposable’ story. Pretty darn big things happen in it, things that have an unanticipated impact on Gregor Eisenhorn.

  They certainly came as a surprise to me.

  Dan Abnett

  Maidstone, August 2017

  PESTILENCE

  The Archenemy infects this universe. If we do not pause to fight that infection here, within our own selves, what purpose is there in taking our fight to the stars?

  – Apothecary Engane,

  from his Treatise on Imperial Medicine

  I

  It is my belief that memory is the finest faculty we as a species possess. Through the function of memory, we are able to gather, hone and transmit all manner of knowledge for the benefit of mankind, and the endless glory of our God-Emperor, may the Golden Throne endure forever more!

  To forget a mistake is to be defeated a second time, so we are taught in the sermons of Thor. How may a great leader plan his campaign without memory of those battles won and lost before? How may his soldiers absorb his teaching and improve without that gift? How may the Ecclesiarchy disseminate its message to the universal populace without that populace holding the teachings in memory? What are scholars, clerks, historians or chroniclers but agencies of memory?

  And what is forgetfulness but the overthrow of memory, the ruination of precious knowledge, and an abhorrence?

  I have, in the service of His Exalted Majesty the Emperor of Terra, waged war upon that abhorrence all my life. I strive to locate things forgotten and return them to the custody of memory. I am a scrabbler in dark places, an illuminator of shadows, a turner of long unturned pages, an asker of questions that have lapsed, forever hunting for answers that would otherwise have remained unvoiced. I am a recollector, prising lost secrets from the taciturn universe and returning them to the safe fold of memory, where they might again improve our lot among the outflung stars.

  My particular discipline is that of Materia Medica, for human medicine was my original calling. Our understanding of our own vital mechanisms is vast and admirable, but we can never know too much about our own biology and how to protect, repair and improve it. It is our burden as a species to exist in a galaxy riven by war, and where war goes, so flourish its hand-servants, injury and disease. It may be said that as each war front advances, so medical knowledge advances too. And where armies fall back in defeat or are destroyed, so medical knowledge retreats or is forgotten. Such are the lapses I seek to redress.

  Upon that very purpose, I came to Symbal Iota late in my forty-eighth year, looking for Ebhoe. To provide context, let me say that this would be the third year of the Genovingian Campaign in the Obscura Segmentum, and about nine sidereal months after the first outbreak of Uhlren’s Pox among the Guard legions stationed on Genovingia itself. Also known, colloquially, as blood-froth, Uhlren’s Pox was named after the first victim it took, a colour-sergeant called Gustaf Uhlren, of the 15th Mordian, if memory serves me. And I pride myself it does.

  As a student of Imperial history, and Materia Medica too, you will have Uhlren’s Pox in your memory. A canker of body and vitality, virulently contagious, it corrupts from within, thickening circulatory fluids and wasting marrow, while embellishing the victim’s skin with foul cysts and buboes. The cycle between infection and death is at most four days. In the later stages, organs rupture, blood emulsifies and bubbles through the pores of the skin, and the victim becomes violently delusional. Some have even conjectured that by this phase, the soul itself has been corroded away. Death is inescapable in almost every case.

  It appeared without warning on Genovingia, and within a month, the Medicae Regimentalis were recording twenty death notices a day. No drug or procedure could be found that began to even slow its effects. No origin for the infection could be located. Worst of all, despite increasingly vigorous programmes of quarantine and cleansing, no method could be found to prevent wholesale contagion. No plague carriers, or means of transmission, were identifiable.

  As an individual man weakens and sickens, so the Imperial Guard forces as a whole began to fail and falter as their best were taken by the pestilence. Within two months, Warmaster Rhyngold’s staff were doubting the continued viability of the entire campaign. By the third month, Uhlren’s Pox had also broken out (apparently miraculously and spontaneously, given its unknown process of dispersal) on Genovingia Minor, Lorches and Adamanaxer Delta. Four separate centres of infection, right along the leading edge of the Imperial advance through the sector. At that point, the contagion had spread to the civilian population of Genovingia itself, and the Administratum had issued a Proclamation of Pandemic. It was said the skies above the cities of that mighty world were black with carrion flies, and the stench of biological pollution permeated every last acre of the planet.
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br />   I had a bureaucratic posting on Lorches at that time, and became part of the emergency body charged with researching a solution. It was weary work. I personally spent over a week in the archive without seeing daylight as I oversaw the systematic interrogation of that vast, dusty body of knowledge.

  It was my friend and colleague Administrator Medica Lenid Vammel who first called our attention to Pirody and the Torment. It was an admirable piece of work on his part, a feat of study, cross-reference and memory. Vammel always had a good memory.

  Under the instruction of Senior Administrator Medica Junas Malter, we diverted over sixty per cent of our staff to further research into the records of Pirody, and requests were sent out to other Genovingian worlds to look to their own archives. Vammel and I compiled the accumulating data ourselves, increasingly certain we had shone a light into the right shadow and found a useful truth.

  Surviving records of the Torment incident on Pirody were painfully thin, though consistent. It was, after all, thirty-four years in the past. Survivors had been few, but we were able to trace one hundred and ninety-one possibles who might yet be alive. They were scattered to the four cosmic winds.

  Reviewing our findings, Senior Malter authorised personal recollection, such was the gravity of the situation, and forty of us, all with rank high administrator or better, were despatched immediately. Vammel, rest his soul, was sent to Gandian Saturnalia, and was caught up in a local civil war and thereafter killed. I do not know if he ever found the man he was looking for. Memory is unkind there.

  And I, I was sent to Symbal Iota.

  II

  Symbal Iota, where it is not covered in oceans that are the most profound mauve in colour (a consequence, so I understand, of algae growth), is a hot, verdant place. Rainforest islands ring the equatorial region in a wide belt.

  I made ’fall at Symbalopolis, a flat-topped volcanic outcrop around whose slopes hive structures cluster like barnacles, and there transferred to a trimaran, which conveyed me, over a period of five days, down the length of the local island group to Saint Bastian.