The Last Hunt Read online

  Backlist

  More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

  The Beast Arises

  1: I AM SLAUGHTER

  2: PREDATOR, PREY

  3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS

  4: THE LAST WALL

  5: THRONEWORLD

  6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

  7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

  8: THE BEAST MUST DIE

  9: WATCHERS IN DEATH

  10: THE LAST SON OF DORN

  11: SHADOW OF ULLANOR

  12: THE BEHEADING

  Space Marine Battles

  WAR OF THE FANG

  A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang

  THE WORLD ENGINE

  An Astral Knights novel

  DAMNOS

  An Ultramarines collection

  DAMOCLES

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare

  OVERFIEND

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

  ARMAGEDDON

  Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire

  Legends of the Dark Millennium

  ASTRA MILITARUM

  An Astra Militarum collection

  ULTRAMARINES

  An Ultramarines collection

  FARSIGHT

  A Tau Empire novella

  SONS OF CORAX

  A Raven Guard collection

  SPACE WOLVES

  A Space Wolves collection

  Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Carcharodons: Red Tithe’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  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.

  Coming events will always cast their shadows before them.

  – Ancient Chogorian steppe proverb

  CHOGORIAN LEXICANUM

  Ayanga – the Lightning Tower, the White Scars Librarium

  Berkut – a breed of raptor native to Chogoris

  Busad – a White Scar’s personal chamber

  Chinyua – a type of Chogorian wine

  Kachan – strange or uncanny

  Khoomei – traditional Chogorian throat singing

  Emchi – a White Scars Apothecary

  Guan dao – a power lance

  Jazag – the laws of the nomad tribes of Chogoris

  Kindjal – a knife

  Khorchin – the variation of Gothic spoken on Chogoris, sometimes known as Chogorian

  Khum Karta – the mountain range where the White Scars fortress-monastery is based

  Ordu – archaic term for a White Scars company

  Plain Zhou – the Chogorian steppes

  Quan Zhou – the White Scars fortress-monastery

  Tulan – a training corridor

  Türüch – a rank equivalent to sergeant

  Ulzi – a knotwork pattern representing the Eternal Labyrinth, the inescapable nature of fate

  Yaksha – daemon

  Zadyin Arga – a Stormseer, the White Scars Librarians

  Zart – human serfs serving the White Scars

  Prologue

  A figure sits atop a weather-beaten rock, clad in white, his legs crossed beneath him. He is alone. Around him, as far as consciousness extends, the steppes of the Plain Zhou stretch. The wind sighs over the tall grass, setting it rippling like the waves of an ocean. In the distance the tips of the Mountains that Scrape the Stars are just visible, giving the horizon a jagged, black-toothed edge.

  The man is old. His hair, bound up around the crown of his head, is grey. His features are wizened, beaten and cured by three centuries of steppe sun and wind. He sees much, and is aware of even more. To the east a herd of wild ux horns is passing by, their lowing carried to him by the wind. Near the base of his rocky perch a vole is scampering between the stalks, scavenging for food. It is being hunted, though it does not yet know it. Far above, a berkut circles, waiting as it rides upon the currents of the sky.

  The figure on the rock is also being hunted. He can sense the creature’s presence, though he cannot yet see it. It is nearby, stalking him. It should not be here. He seeks it out in the twitch of the grass, in the shadow that creeps ever closer, slowly circling. But still, for all his perception, he cannot find it.

  Darkness falls across him. A lesser being would have shivered. He looks up. Dusk is still many hours distant, but today it has come early. Today, the heavens are full of flesh. The figure reaches for the totemic staff set on the rock before him, his expression grim.

  Hunger. The eternal constant, insatiable and vast. It floods the skies above the man, blocking out the sun, burning away the clouds. It reaches down towards the steppes with a billion, billion shadowy tendrils, covering them in questing, hideous meat.

  The Plain Zhou dissolves. The Khum Karta crumbles, the vast mountain range swallowed whole. As the world is consumed, the lone predator strikes. It comes at the figure in
a blur of speed, all talons and hard, spiny carapace. The figure brings his staff up, but he is too slow. Too old.

  He wakes. Shadows surround him. For a moment, he is filled with horror. For a moment he still sees his world swallowed up, consumed utterly. But no. It is dusk. The sun is sinking towards the mountain tips, a disk of blood-red that makes the steppe grasses look like a sea of flickering flames.

  He takes one slow, shuddering breath, as the last of the nightmare vision disintegrates around him. His staff is still in his hand, his knuckles white. He stands slowly, bending limbs and cracking joints left inert for too long. He is old no more.

  The vision has changed. He must take word of it to the Ayanga. He needs guidance. He drops down into the rock’s lengthening shadow. There his bike stands, its smooth, white surfaces gleaming in the encroaching darkness. Slinging his staff across his back, he mounts it and guns the engine. He circles the rock once, the plain dust kicked up by thick tyres shrouding the erratic stone. Then he turns north, towards the distant mountains. The roar of his engine carries across the steppe until it is lost, swallowed up by the gathering night.

  On the burning winds they come,

  Warriors of the Sky,

  saviour and slaver both.

  – Traditional Darkand tribal poem

  Chapter One

  MASTER OF CEREMONIES

  TIME TO FURNACE SEASON PEAK [TERRAN STANDARD]: 114 HOURS.

  TIME TO PREDICTED PRIMARY XENOS PLANETFALL [TERRAN STANDARD]: 69 HOURS.

  Temple District, Heavenfall

  The Spur of Mankind Descended was hushed. Light flooded through the glassaic dome of the temple primaris, painting the swept flagstones and carved rustwood pews in vibrant shades of blue, green and gold. The air was heavy with dust motes and the silent expectations of threescore dignitaries, sweating in their yat wool gowns and broad-rimmed ceremonial caps. They were seated before the spur itself, tribal hetmen and Administratum adepts alike. Darkand’s ruling elite, come to the slope-city of Heavenfall to observe the onset of the Furnace Season.

  The rattle of beads disturbed the expectant silence. Wordlessly the High Enunciator, Septimus Traik, made his way between the pews, head bowed in supplication, features unreadable behind the thousand white beads of his traditional shontii veil. Only Governor Harren turned his head to observe the leader of the Church of the Emperor’s Voice as he passed by. He wondered how Traik could withstand the heat in his impractical garments. Harren’s own ageing flesh was slippery beneath the thick folds of red-dyed yat wool. Like Harren, Traik was an off-worlder, born not on Darkand’s wind-whipped steppes, but amidst the upper-hive grav spires of Soltara. Traik, however, seemed unaffected by the ­stifling nature of the local garb.

  The governor felt Chancellor Tugan, seated next to him, shift and lean in. Unlike Harren or Traik, Tugan was Darkand born and bred, his dusky, weathered skin and stocky build speaking of decades hunting across the steppes beyond Heavenfall’s Founding Wall.

  ‘A message from Ganzorig,’ the chancellor murmured in the governor’s ear.

  ‘What is it?’ Harren hissed, fighting the urge to scratch at the sweat sliding its way down his sides. ‘Does he not know it’s Descent Day?’

  ‘He knows,’ Tugan said, lips so close they almost brushed Harren’s aural augmetics. ‘He says it’s a high priority contact. Code aleph.’

  ‘Aleph?’ Harren said, voice spiking. One of the Administratum adepts seated in front glanced round.

  ‘You think it’s…’ Harren began, lowering his tone.

  Tugan simply nodded, dark eyes fixed on the governor. He didn’t need to say what had triggered an aleph-level communiqué. It could only be one thing.

  They were here, and they were early.

  ‘Can you deal with it?’ Harren asked. ‘Placate them and brief me in the centrum dominus the moment this foolishness is over?’

  ‘I can try,’ Tugan said. ‘The warp must have favoured their arrival.’

  ‘Or they desire more from us than usual,’ Harren said. ‘Don’t keep them waiting. Go.’

  Tugan rose from the pews and slipped out of the temple, golden chancellery robes hitched around his ankles. Harren realised that Traik’s stately procession had reached the ceremony’s destination.

  The Spur was the rock face that stood in place of one of the temple’s walls. The craggy ochre cliff reached all the way to the wide chamber’s glassaic dome, its natural surface untouched by the masons and artisans that had fashioned the place of worship around it. Its only blemish was at its centre – there the rock had been smashed and shattered, left scarred by plasma burns and blunt-force trauma. The blackened vents and exhaust chutes of a landing shuttle still protruded from the rock, where the craft had buried itself three millennia previously. This was the heart of the Spur of Mankind Descended, the sacred place where humanity had first set foot on Darkand.

  Harren approached Traik. The High Enunciator waited beneath the shuttle in silence. The governor had never liked him, or the cultish offshoot of the Ministorum – the Church of the Emperor’s Voice – that had held sway on Darkand since the purging of the Bor-tri cult. Given that he’d only been planetside for eight years Terran standard, Harren had been surprised when the Congregational Ministers had voted unanimously for Traik to take the position of High Enunciator. He was the youngest off-worlder to have ever held the post. This was his first Descent Day.

  It was the first Descent Day for all of them, Harren reminded himself. Furnace Season only occurred once a century, when Darkand’s orbit dragged the planet close to the fixed stellar flare listed by the Adeptus Astro-cartograpae as Fury’s Pillar. The climatological phenomenon left nine-tenths of the planet a scorched wasteland and drove the steppe tribes to the polar regions, while the citizens of Darkand’s only fixed habitation centre, Heavenfall, sought shelter in the catacombs that riddled the slope-city’s mountainside. The Furnace Season’s start was heralded by Descent Day, when both tribal representatives and the planet’s off-world Imperial elite came together to ceremonially re-enact the arrival of mankind’s first colonists.

  Harren joined Traik, and the two of them mounted the steps to the shuttle’s rear hatch. There was a scrape of rustwood on stone and a scuffling of slipshoe-clad feet as the congregation rose.

  The two came to a halt before the closed hatch. Traik raised his hand and splayed his long, pallid digits against the gene-lock pad. There was a whirring sound as the ceramite-plated hatchway slid open. The shuttle’s interior was a lightless depth, the illumination of the temple picking out only a few feet of worn, rusty decking plates. A stench hit Harren, like the gaseous exhalation of a rotting cadaver – void mould, the musk of old rubber and mech lubricants, the sickly sweet stink of long-dead vermin. Despite the heat of his gown, he shivered.

  Another few minutes and it would be finished. He only needed to take a few paces into the darkness of the shuttle with Traik and recite the Founding Canticle. The High Enunciator would hold a yellowing, jawless skull – said to have belonged to one of the very first human colonists – for Harren to place his hand upon while he rededicated the planet’s government to the God-Emperor and their forefathers. That, along with a brief ceremonial confession of ritualised sins, and the governor’s part in the Day of Descent would be over. He could re-emerge, ancient tradition observed, and be in the centrum dominus within half an hour.

  So why was he hesitating?

  Traik shifted next to him. It was a tiny movement, almost lost beneath the heavy folds of his gown, but it sent Harren’s hesitation into flight. He was being ridiculous. Head bowed and robes hitched, he stepped across the threshold and in through the ­shuttle hatchway.

  The stink of the ancient, long-abandoned craft grew worse, and he fought the urge to bring a gold-embroidered sleeve up to his nose. He took another step into the darkness, just far enough to be hidden from the congregation below. Deep enough for th
ree-thousand-year-old shadows to fully embrace him.

  He heard a clicking noise, faint and regular. It made him frown. A moment passed before he could place it – it was the sound of the gene-lock pad engaging. He began to turn back towards the hatch just as the noise was replaced by the whirring of the door. The governor caught a split-second glimpse of Traik, still shrouded in his heavy ceremonial gown and veil, looming in the hatchway. Then the door sealed with a crump of locking bars, and Harren was plunged into the lightless depths of the shuttle.

  For a moment, he didn’t move. For a moment, he didn’t breathe. For a moment he was angry and confused. He took a step towards the hatch, arms out in the darkness.

  Then he heard a slow scraping sound, and the anger and confusion vanished, eaten up by sudden, heart-jolting terror. He wasn’t alone. There was something else in here with him.

  His angry words soon turned to screaming.

  The Day of Descent was over. The ascent was only just beginning.

  The Pinnacle, Heavenfall

  The door to the primary vox-hub’s gene-lock read Chancellor Tugan’s palm and slid open to admit him. A government landcar had taken the chancellor from Heavenfall’s temple district to the administrative sector, then a grav-lift up to its central communications station nestled at the very peak of the city’s cliff-like architectural strata. Vox Majoris Ganzorig, a skinny, myopic man, Heavenfall born and raised, met him at the main entrance.

  ‘They’re on channel eighteen-nine, chancellor,’ the communications chief said as he walked Tugan into the chamber. The room was high-roofed and circular, with six tiered rows of wall gantries lining a central hub filled with brass-rimmed vox-relays and monitoring stations. Though filled with dozens of communications adepts, it was strangely subdued. The staff were all at their workbenches, reports reduced to low murmurs that competed with the fizz and crackle of the vox-horns. Ganzorig took Tugan into a substation sectioned off from the main theatre by more security panels.

  This room was smaller, with only six adepts monitoring high-yield arrays. Like all the primary hub staff they were Heaven­fall natives, their longer, leaner builds and paler features contrasting with the stocky breeding of the steppe peoples. Even after three decades serving Governor Harren at the heart of Darkand’s government, Ganzorig still felt out of place at the Pinnacle, the nerve centre of Heavenfall’s government. Bar the tribal representatives and steppe lobbyists, almost every non-Imperial member of Darkand’s ruling elite had been born and raised in Heavenfall’s steep, narrow streets. Compared to them Tugan struck a squat, bald figure whose heavy robes hid muscle hardened on the steppes and skin left darkened and cracked by wind and sun. He would never truly fit in with the Heavenfall elite, the mountainside politicos who ruled the planet’s only fixed settlement. That, he suspected, was part of the reason for his appointment as chancellor. Divide and rule; it had ever been the Imperial way.