Rachel Harrison is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novel Honourbound, featuring the character Commissar Severina Raine, as well the accompanying short stories ‘Execution’, ‘Trials’, ‘Fire and Thunder’, ‘A Company of Shadows’, and ‘The Darkling Hours’, which won a 2019 Scribe Award in the Best Short Story category. Also for Warhammer 40,000 she has written the novella Blood Rite, numerous short stories including ‘The Third War’ and ‘Dishonoured’, the short story ‘Dirty Dealings’ for Necromunda, and the Warhammer Horror audio drama The Way Out.

An Extract from ‘The Horusian Wars: Divination’

An extract from
‘The Maiden of the Dream’.
Taken from The Horusian Wars: Divination
by John French

Mylasa Yaygus stepped from the shelter of the doorway as the grey man passed. It had started to snow, white shards falling from an iron sky to carpet the city streets. Crisp whiteness crunched under her boots. The black chimneys rose above her, scraping the cold sky. A layer of cold mist had begun to form in the air, pulling halos from the streetlights atop their iron poles. The street was almost empty, just a few scribes from the broker houses, their black velvet robes gathering a scattering of white as they carried out whatever task their masters had set them. A message runner stalked past her, sprung bladed legs hissing, eye lenses fixed on its distant destination. The grey man moved between the scattered pedestrians like water, his movements unhurried and fluid. A long cloak hung from his shoulders, its hood lowered around his neck to allow for the tall hat that marked him as a debt broker of the second order. Under the cloak he wore layered coats of grey velvet and silk. His gloves were soft leather the colour of storm clouds; his neckerchief and waistcoat were slate grey with silver buttons. The cane in his left hand was burnished steel capped with jet. Thus clothed he fitted the world he moved through without seam and wrinkle. He did not belong here, though. He was not a debt broker. In a sense he was not even human.

The snow began to fall more heavily; Mylasa quickened her step. Ahead of her the man in grey stepped out of the way of a pair of tracked servitors pulling a cart heaped with scroll tubes. He glanced behind him and for an instant she had a view of the pale flesh of his face and his hook-nosed profile. She saw the glint of a dark eye.