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Back The Magos Save as PDF
Chapters (51)
  1. Suggested Reading Order
  2. Title Page
  3. Warhammer 40,000
  4. Introduction
  5. PESTILENCE
  6. MASTER IMUS’ TRANSGRESSION
  7. REGIA OCCULTA
  8. MISSING IN ACTION
  9. BACKCLOTH FOR A CROWN ADDITIONAL
  10. THE STRANGE DEMISE OF TITUS ENDOR
  11. THE CURIOSITY
  12. PLAYING PATIENCE
  13. THORN WISHES TALON
  14. GARDENS OF TYCHO
  15. THE KEELER IMAGE
  16. PERIHELION
  17. THE MAGOS
  18. One
  19. Two
  20. Three
  21. Four
  22. Five
  23. Six
  24. Seven
  25. Eight
  26. Nine
  27. Ten
  28. Eleven
  29. Twelve
  30. Thirteen
  31. Fourteen
  32. Fifteen
  33. Sixteen
  34. Seventeen
  35. Eighteen
  36. Nineteen
  37. Twenty
  38. Twenty-One
  39. Twenty-Two
  40. Twenty-Three
  41. Twenty-Four
  42. Twenty-Five
  43. Twenty-Six
  44. Twenty-Seven
  45. Twenty-Eight
  46. Twenty-Nine
  47. Thirty
  48. Chronology
  49. About the Author
  50. A Black Library Publication
  51. Cover

I threw myself flat as shots tore out the wall plaster behind me. At some point, Fischig and Midas burst in, weapons blazing. I saw three or four veterans drop, sliced through by silent needles, and another six tumbled as shotgun rounds blew them apart.

Traves came down the aisle, blasting his old service-issue lasrifle at me. I rolled and fired, but my shot went wide. His face distorted as a needle round punched through it, and he fell in a crumpled heap.

Wrex and her fire-teams exploded in. Flames from some spilled accelerants billowed up the wall.

I got up, and then was thrown back by a las-shot that blew off my left hand.

Spinning, falling, I saw Lund, struggling to make her prosthetic fingers work the unmodified trigger of Traves’ lasgun.

My bolt-round hit her with such force she flew back down the aisle, hit the wall, and tore the Imperial aquila down.

Not a single veteran escaped the Guildhall alive. The firefight raged for two hours. Wrex lost five men to the experienced guns of the Sameter Ninth veterans. They stood to the last. No more can be said of any Imperial Guard unit.

The whole affair left me sour and troubled. I have devoted my life to the service of the Imperium, to protect it against its manifold foes, inside and out.

Not against its servants. However misguided, they were loyal and true. However wrong, they were shaped that way by the service they had endured in the Emperor’s name.

Lund cost me my hand. A hand for a hand. They gave me a prosthetic on Sameter. I never used it. For two years, I made do with a fused stump. Surgeons on Messina finally gave me a fully functional graft.

I consider it a small price to pay for them.

I have never been back to Sameter. Even today, they are still finding the secreted, hidden bodies. So very many, dead in the Emperor’s name.

BACKCLOTH FOR A CROWN ADDITIONAL

BACKCLOTH FOR A CROWN ADDITIONAL

Lord Froigre, much to everyone’s dismay including, I’m sure, his own, was dead.

It was a dry, summer morning in 355.M41, and I was taking breakfast with Alizebeth Bequin on the terrace of Spaeton House when I received the news. The sky was a blurry blue, the colour of Sameterware porcelain, and down in the bay the water was a pale lilac, shot through with glittering frills of silver. Sand doves warbled from the drowsy shade of the estate orchards.

Jubal Kircher, my craggy, dependable chief of household security, came out into the day’s heat from the garden room, apologised courteously for interrupting our private meal, and handed me a folded square of thin transmission paper.

‘Trouble?’ asked Bequin, pushing aside her dish of ploin crepes.

‘Froigre’s dead,’ I replied, studying the missive.

‘Froigre who?’

‘Lord Froigre of House Froigre.’

‘You knew him?’