BLACK LIBRARY

Books | eBooks | MP3 Audiobooks

To see the full Black Library range visit

blacklibrary.com and warhammer.com

Contents

Cover

Seven Ships – Russell Zimmerman

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Lords of Silence’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Seven Ships

Russell Zimmerman

Once, I had a name, and a purpose, and a certainty of the galaxy and of my place in it. I had been a cadet at the Schola Progenium, a student, an earnest, eager servant of the God-Emperor of Mankind, cursed be his name, wretched be his Carrion Throne. My master took that name from me, and that purpose, and that certainty. My master blessed me with terrible freedom. My master calls me Scrivener now.

I earned it. Standing in the rubble that had once been the Schola Progenium consecrated to honour Saint Aeliana of the Clear Waters, I took that name with my own two hands. My old name? My Imperium-name? I had simply been given it, granted it, had it handed to me for the pitiful act of being born – a mewling, pink-faced, wretched thing, slick with my mother’s blood. Scrivener, though? Scrivener I had earned. The hard way. The honest way.

‘You two. Boys. Come here.’ Master Fecht had pointed at us, standing at the top of the stairs, amidst the rubble that had been our scholam. So many had died – the air had been so thick with flies – the warring stinks of blood, faeces and smoke had been so strong – that my mind had desperately wanted to focus on something, anything, but the world around me. And so my mind had settled on him. My Master Fecht. Fecht was a murderous giant who did not need the stairs to loom over us but stood atop them regardless. A titan in sickly green armour the colour of a week-old bruise or a month-old corpse. Fecht. A Plague Marine of the Death Guard.

‘One of you will record our deeds. One of you will bear witness. One of you will chronicle the marks we leave.’

His helmeted head turned ever so slightly to regard the pair of us. It was featureless, as sharp and powerful as the prow of a ship, slick with mucus or something like it, streaked here and there with rust and old blood. It gave nothing away. From within it, his voice came out tinny, somehow moist, but never lacking in strength or certainty.

‘One,’ he said.

Next to me stood another senior student, Gaerhardt Vetrule. The two of us had been plucked from the survivors seemingly at random. We had grown up together. I remembered trying to catch up to him, trying to rival him at all, in anything. He had been our best, he had led our class. I remembered admiring him, respecting him, envying him all of my short, meaningless life. It had been easy to imagine him doing us all proud in the Commissariat or Ordo Tempestus some day, as easy as picturing others of my progena classmates rising to be heroes of the Astra Militarum, the Imperial Navy or perhaps even the Adepta Sororitas. It had all come so easily to Gaerhardt, and those like him. It had always come so easily to them. I had struggled. I had floundered. I had been punished, time and again, for not returning the Golden Throne’s generosity with excellence. I had never once imagined myself as an officer or a hero, as someone who mattered or would live on, immortal, in history books.

As Fecht spoke his terms I thought back on our shared childhoods and had no doubt that Gaerhardt Vetrule would beat me in a fair fight. I did not give him one.

I felt the bitterness rise in me as bile at the back of my throat, but instead of spitting out the mouthful of vomit, I croaked out something like a roar. Before anyone had given us any signal to begin, I had grabbed Gaerhardt by the head, tackled him to the stone stairs leading to our ravaged chapel, and begun pounding. I hammered his head against those steps. I hammered his head until he didn’t have a head left worth mentioning, until I could barely hold on to what remained of it. I looked up, and Fecht nodded.

I had lived, Gaerhardt had died, and I had become the chronicler – the Scrivener. I had become someone who mattered.

I began to write the tale of the Heretic Astartes champion Katarrh Fecht, Plague Marine, Death Guard, Venomariner. My liberator. My master. The lord of a warband that had fallen onto insignificant Dastignon Secundus, blessing it with their misery, their spite, and their power.

Dastignon had always been small, as agri worlds went, but it was green and fertile. Grasslands had been turned to wheat and rice fields untold generations ago, and it had been a breadbasket – a feeder world – and little else for thousands of years. The population had been kept small, the output high; the majority of the planet was nearly barren of humanity, just rolling fields of grain threshers and ploughs, combines and row croppers, spreaders and sprayers, and just enough people to keep them all working. Dastignon had one city, and to the best of my knowledge, one institution worth mentioning. Us.

Someone somewhere very far away, very long ago, had decided the central location of Dastignon within the sector made it ideal not only for distributing foodstuffs in an efficient manner, but also as a dumping ground where war orphans like me could be collected and refurbished. The idyllic grasslands and rolling hills had given our Schola Progenium facility ample room to train, and it was, after all, cheaper to raise us where our food was produced than to feed us elsewhere. We had been the children of Dastignon, immigrants from far-off worlds. We had been raised to serve the Golden Throne, a tithe measured and delivered like any sack of barley or wheat. We had been trained to protect the Imperium.

But the Imperium had failed to protect us in return.

It had started as an illness. Our larders had spoiled unexpectedly, our well water turned sour, but as our bellies twisted with hunger and we lost our heads to feverish thirst, we had eaten and drunk regardless. Our bodies had rejected the fouled food from both ends, and the reek of sickness had filled our barracks.

Fecht had set the stage and found us weak, sickly, and ripe for the taking. When he had finally attacked, leading just his barest handful of killers, it had been over before it had begun. Our training, our faith, our weapons and armour, our bodies – all of it had failed us, as did the Carrion King on far-off Terra. Our fall had been glorious and wretched and beautiful and vile. The few hundred of us hardy enough to survive the sickness and clever enough to survive the slaughter began to serve him… And I, shivering and fever-strong, had spread Gaerhardt’s brains across the fire-blasted stones that had once led to Saint Aeliana’s chapel and earned my place.

‘Lord Fecht,’ I asked him later, fawning appropriately, eager to learn his tale. Terrible sounds came from all around us as his lieutenants settled in to the ruins for the night, each of them a vulture making his own nest and lining it with victims. ‘How did you come to blight our humble world?’

‘We were spat here. This place is our prison, for as long as we let it hold us,’ he said simply, his voice a rumble, a low growl, a metallic, distant thing ringing from inside his slick, featureless helmet. ‘To take to the stars again, we must earn it. With our boots on the ground, striding through the mud and blood and glorious waste, we must earn it. Through surviving and despoiling, we must earn it. We must beat this place and make a show of it, and rebuild our names.’

Then he was silent, or as near to it as he ever came amidst his groaning, creaking armour. I waited for a full count to seven hundred. When I was sure he was done talking, when all I heard was the hiss coming from the tubes connecting helmet to backpack, backpack to torso, torso back to helmet – the closed system that made up Katarrh Fecht until he chose to open it – I scurried off through the camp.

I had other Plague Marines to record, other tales to immortalise, other legends to grow. He had been spat out onto our world with few, but they were potent. I had learned of some of them in the weeks since our befouling, our slaughter, our glorious loss. As we marched, spreading across the countryside, I found my opportunities to learn of them all.

Orrion Helmynth was the most fervent of the band, the most profane, the most eager to grow a proper war cult, all the better to desecrate worlds in our lord’s unholy name. He was younger than Fecht, and swollen with ambition. Where Master Fecht spoke rarely and rustily, Helmynth spoke often, words escaping him like a flood, a torrent, a glorious river of mucus shining with our dark god’s gifts. Fecht never removed his helmet, but Helmynth never wore one – all the better to preach, to show off his scars, to force those around him to see his blessed boils. When we raided, he strode into battle wearing the sickly green armour of the Death Guard but with his head exposed, his fate in Grandfather’s palsied hands, his true protection coming from the scrolls rippling in the foul breeze all around him and the curse-prayers he croaked out as he fought.

It was Helmynth who taught me Nurgle’s name, and his smile as I coughed up the word for the first time was beautiful and terrible to behold. It was he who taught me that long bones could be turned into the finest of quills, and of the seven fluids used to make the most profane of inks, and where, on and in the bodies of my former classmates and our instructors, to find both. I had burst Gaerhardt Vetrule’s skull to bits and wasted the fruits within, but still I had found a use for one of his shins, as Helmynth watched.

Helmynth would be a Tallyman someday, he was certain. He was sure he would survive Dastignon, survive their mutiny, their shattering, their punishment. He was sure he would sin greatly enough in Nurgle’s blessed name to rise and be recognised properly as a preacher, his faith rewarded, returned to the Venomariners fleet in triumph.

Helmynth took as his personal retinue the choir of the Schola Progenium – as fit and strong and hardy as any of us, but with the loudest voices, all the better to sing out the praises of Grandfather Nurgle, Orrion Helmynth and Katarrh Fecht, in that order. Brother Trayson, once a drill abbot, now led the choir in battle and in all other things, enforcer to the rest of the bloated student body. Trayson hung on Helmynth’s every word.

He kept my quills busy, did Orrion Helmynth, in the weeks that came. When I was not recording the words and deeds of Master Fecht, Helmynth summoned me. I added to his scrolls. I recorded the fevered thoughts that brought him his next sermon. I recorded the visions that came to him in dreams and coughed-up sacraments. I recorded his curses and prayers. The long, thin scrolls that I didn’t affix to his armour with wax and mucus were left behind. I fouled the paper as he taught me, then stashed them here and there and everywhere, seeds of truth and sickness, waiting to be found by whatever farmers, fools and families might stumble across them.

If Helmynth kept me harvesting quills and mixing inks and barely able to keep up with his sermons and lessons, the opposite was true of Master Fecht’s strong right hand, Fain. He never spoke. He could not. Too much of him was missing.

A Blightlord Terminator, Fain had survived a bolter round to the face from one of the Emperor’s pathetic faithful. Most of his head was gone now, simply gone – hollowed out like an apple with a bite taken from it. What remained had scabbed over but never healed, and now wept pus and blood and other, sweeter, things, and had been left crawling with flies and maggots, never again whole but never quite letting him die. He had but one eye, half a ruined nose, and very little brain. What spirit he ever showed, what spark of life, what consciousness, was devoted wholly to the Plaguefather and to Fain’s battle-brother and warlord, Katarrh Fecht, who had dragged the Terminator out of the fight and to the Plague Surgeons. Fain was Fecht’s shadow, his brute, his protection against any who might take up arms to strike him down through treachery.

My brothers and sisters in the flock avoided rather than followed Fain. He didn’t need followers. He was a force unto himself. In our first raid, on the very first day after we had left the shattered scholam behind, I saw Fain’s spinning, spitting autocannon cut down an entire Dastignon family in seconds. The weapon had screamed as he’d reaped their bloodline, but the Blightlord himself had been nearly as loud. He had roared while doing it – a wordless, grotesque, glorious warble, the voice-cracking wail of a beast doing terrible cruelty to others and relishing it.

Plague Marine Kerrj Maggotfill, too, shouted when he fought, heedless of the once-rebreather that his face had swollen to meld with. He didn’t shout to let out a plaintive, feral wail, though, to let loose the words that a shattered brain could no longer shape. No, he did it to be noticed. He screamed taunts, both from his rebreather-muzzle and the secondary mouth growing from the belly of his armour. He coughed curses; he laughed, jeered, spat, and vomited insults at whoever and whatever faced him. He, his huge, rusted cleaver and his wickedly lethal plague spewer were always in the thickest, wettest heart of the fighting as we terrorised the agri-plains on our long march. He revelled in the harvest and ever sought the eye and praise of Master Fecht or, failing that, Helmynth the someday-Tallyman, to whom he boasted of his victories and slaughters.

Many of the younger students and struggling last-year progena fell into Maggotfill’s wake, and respect for him spread from them to the most violent, reckless, and feckless civilians we recruited. Among our ever-swelling unholy band, those most interested in glory tried to keep up with Kerrj in every raid, every skirmish, every fight. Like flies swarming waste, he drew those weakest in confidence and most desperate to look otherwise. I was the Scrivener. I paid the most attention to our shifting ranks, the ebb and flows of power in our reeking encampments, the patterns of our sickly herd. I saw how his followers grew swollen near their kidneys and adrenal glands, how they augmented their courage instead of truly believing. He made the detritus useful. Brutal, simple instruments, like him, but powerful in a flood.

Those three alone would have been enough, alongside Fecht himself, to threaten soft Dastignon. Those three, sons of Nurgle, sons of Mortarion, sons of pestilence, misery and death, were threat enough. They were implacable in their rot-green armour, covered here and there with secondary mouths, gaping maws hungry to gulp down pain, dotted with crust-caked tertiary eyes – red and yellow things that granted them preternatural awareness. They were brutish and broad, looming shadows of doom, unstoppable war tyrants, strong and sure – a wave of mucus-covered steel that could drown our paltry world. They had another, however. One who granted subtlety to Master Fecht’s warband, who sharpened them, who gave them a cruel cleverness over their hapless foes.

The last renegade who followed Fecht into battle did not stride boldly forward, weathering the fire of Dastignon’s planetary defence forces, protected by his faith in the Lord of Flies and the sickly green armour of the Death Guard. But he followed Fecht, still. The one called Eraston wore armour of scuffed black paint over cold steel, all of it half-wrapped beneath an oversized homespun cloak and hood to disrupt his silhouette. He did not fight, he killed. He did not charge, he flanked. He did not stand, he skulked. He spent as much time away from our cult as with it, it seemed, constantly patrolling and scouting, sliding from shadow to shadow and ambush to ambush. When Eraston spoke in battle, it was not to roar the sevenfold curses as Helmynth did, to grunt and scream and wail like mindless Fain, or to brag and challenge like brash Maggotfill. Eraston swore. I do not mean only that he spoke forbidden words – words coarse and blasphemous by Imperial standards. No, I mean that he swore.

‘I make pacts and promises, I invoke oaths, I offer prayers of the moment. I bargain,’ he told me, perhaps a week into our trip across the countryside. I had caught up to him at the edge of a raid site, where he was methodically flensing a fallen foe after an ambush. His skin was pale, but not as sickly-bloated or corpse-white as the others, and while he had tired bags under his eyes, those eyes were ever darting, ever sharp. ‘And when my prayers are answered, I pay my debts, so that they will be answered again when next I call.’

Eraston was slight of frame compared to his fellow renegades, and he had not received as many, or as vivid, flesh-mutating blessings. He looked… alarmingly human. His armour was not a twisted thing, crawling with runes, dripping with fluids, rippling like meat. His armour was as cold and hard as his eyes, and he took it off or stripped it down at times to move more quietly. He had the trick that some big men had, to move as though they were smaller. The killer’s trick.

The chilling normalcy of him, the mundanity he could muster when he tried, made it almost possible to forget that I was watching him peel a farmer from root to stem as we spoke.

‘Who answers them?’ I asked hungrily, pen spilling vile ink and eager to scratch new profanities into old papers. I was the Scrivener. I had to know more. ‘The prayers you offer?’

‘I will not name them for you, boy, not for free,’ he said, giving me a wry, wolfish smile and a shake of his head that left a forelock fallen to shadow his face. ‘I know that Helmynth has taught you the true name of the Lord of Pestilence, and that he took nothing in return. I am not him. You have nothing to offer me, so I will not trade you the names of the Plague God’s peers and rivals.’

‘I… I can offer you immortality?’ I forced a smile, hoping it was still charming despite the teeth I was now missing. Some part of me remembered having been complimented on my smile, before. My quill tapped the paper. ‘I can offer you history!’

‘I have too much of both,’ he said, waving me away with his bloody knife, soaked in gore to his elbow, shaking his head again. ‘Away, scribbler. My steel is thirsty today.’

I left, then, and did not seek him out for further interviews.

Eraston claimed no clique, no band, no eager gaggle of followers from amidst Master Fecht’s cult. He was not proud Kerrj or preaching Helmynth, and he showed no interest in being either. No champions followed him into battle. They would have slowed him down.

We raided, and raided, and raided again. For nearly two months, we marched, we butchered, we recruited, carving our way across the face of Dastignon. Ahead of us we saw fertile fields and gentle hills – idyllic, hard-working farming communities that fed half the sector. Behind us, we left bodies to bloat and blossom in the sun, grain silos half filled with corpses, fields where soil had been mixed with blood, bile and waste and churned into mud beneath our boots, wells, rivers and creeks blessed with Nurgle’s putrid gifts.

Local fools with scatterguns and farming tools had tried to stop us at first. Then larger groups of them with a few armoured vehicles and, once, even a mega-harvester’s whirring blades. Then the planetary defence force proper began to arrive, a scattered patrol here and there, then squads, then whole platoons as Dastignon’s immune system organised to repel us. The day came for them to challenge us.

Fain mowed them down, his half-face contorted in wordless rage as he held an entire flank by himself. Kerrj spewed insults and noxious slime at them in equal measure, charging up the middle with rot-addled berserkers in tow. Eraston found enemy officers and killed them, either with the subtlety of his knife or the shocking, searing fire of his ornate plasma pistol. Helmynth called down our Grandfather’s blessings and curses as he smote left and right with his new favourite tool of worship, a scythe that he had turned into a double-bladed affair, welding steel to steel near the haft with potent runes. Runes that made my vision swim when I looked at them and caused my hand to spasm the one time I attempted to copy them.

And through it all, above it all, waded Katarrh Fecht, Plague Champion. His thrice-blessed boltgun belched fire and steel and death, his plague-crusted fist rent souls from bodies with every foul swing. He was our captain, master of our bloated warband, the unpreaching brother at the head of our congregation. He did not give speeches, our Fecht. He prayed to the Plaguefather with his actions, not his words.

Fully a third of little Dastignon’s planetary defence force stood against us in one battle. Fecht brushed them aside, recruited the survivors, and led us to do as we pleased across the fertile countryside.

I bless my pages with phlegm and tears alike, and both with pride, for I weep while I write this passage. Lo, let none say that my classmates, my brothers and sisters, my peers, did not do their best to follow Fecht’s example. Where he led, we followed. Where he shepherded, we went. What he did, we mimicked. For weeks we grew in Nurgle’s worship, and every soul in our growing army knew we had Fecht to thank for it when the first nurglings burst from the distended stomachs of dead foes and friends, and began to frolic.

Seven times seven corpses did we dress and portion and display after the first battle that gave us bodies enough to do so, guided by Fecht’s orders and led by Eraston’s nimble blade. Seven scars, smeared with unholy waters fresh from corpses, did my classmates gouge into themselves, each one praying for properly infested wounds to display and boast of, while Maggotfill egged us on. Seven names did we learn for Nurgle – seven names to speak most truly when your mouth filled with blood or bile or both, seven names to hiss out between clenched teeth as you prayed to survive a battlefield injury.

Seven strikes did we learn, taught by the war preacher, and for seven hours a day did our most physical, our most faithful, train with their weapons. Helmynth instructed us all in a sacred combination of seven attacks meant to maim, to cripple, and only finally, as needs must, to kill with a blade. Orrion Helmynth adored the sevenfold flurry he had created.

Ever was it Nurgle’s wish, and Master Fecht’s, that we leave our foes alive long enough to test their mettle, rather than killing them quickly from the get-go. Simple Fain forgot, or his brutality transcended that tenet of our egalitarian faith, and dark Eraston murdered efficiently as he willed; but the rest, the faithful, even Master Fecht himself – especially Master Fecht – did what they could to string out a fight. They gave us, the cadets, the chance to survive and endure. They gave every hearty farmhand the same fighting chance. They gave as many defence troopers as possible the opportunity, as well. If our victims recognised that a wound was too grievous, if they saw that a battle was lost, if they had their eyes opened to the living sickness Nurgle offered and his Plague Marines spread, they were allowed to join us. Fully. Without reservation. Nurgle’s blessings, once given, are not withdrawn. Blessed by the flies, anointed by the sputum, sworn to service by words that made their gums bleed, they joined us. Brother Trayson took them in and found them a place in the ranks.

We grew. We festered. We marched.

We did not ride – our enemies’ vehicles were disabled explosively or blessed with the seven fluids and left behind as gifts – we marched. It made it slow going, perhaps, but our opportunities to spread filth were many, and our goal was always clear.

‘We go to the capital,’ Fecht rumbled one night, helmeted head ever looking forward, ever upward to the stars. ‘And the ships that leave there. If they can carry grain to other worlds, they can carry us. If they can carry us, we can carry our Lord of Pestilence.’

‘Back to the stars!’ Helmynth roared, smile grotesque, his cult cheering.

‘Back to the Plague Fleet!’ Kerrj matched his enthusiasm, waving his cleaver overhead.

‘Back to the Venomariners!’ Helmynth lifted his voice higher, his choir harmonising.

‘Back to Lord Skurvithrax!’ Kerrj bellowed.

‘Back to Lord Skurvithrax.’ Fecht cut them both off with his low, grating, matter-of-fact growl. Silence fell like a shroud over those near enough to hear. I watched his terrible, beautiful plague fist clench so hard that the thrice-blessed metal groaned and creaked.

‘Back to Lord Skurvithrax, indeed.’

I had not heard the name before. Master Fecht had spoken only briefly of their exile. Emboldened by our progress across the countryside, by the lights of the city in the distance, by the climax of our unholy raid surely approaching, I dared to ask him. I dared to press for more.

I did so as the pair of us strode the perimeter of our foetid camp, never straying far enough away to lose the scent of the cult at our back. He stopped and stared at the distant lights of the capital.

‘He made sport of us,’ Master Fecht eventually rumbled. His armour hissed and gurgled; his breathing sped up as he spoke of his once and perhaps future lord. ‘Our captain-lord in the Venomariners challenged an order from Skurvithrax.’

He did not move. He stood, still as a statue save the buzzing of flies all around him, and his voice came from everywhere and nowhere, not merely from within his helmet.

‘Our captain-lord sought freedom and a ship of his own. He mutinied. I followed him, as did so many others, as we all had, for ages. Had he not seen us through the Long War, thus far? Was he not a Chosen of Nurgle? An exemplar of the Plague Lord? A favoured son, a firstborn, a Ferryman of the Sixth Plague Company?’

Fecht made a terrible, hollow noise that might have been a snort or a laugh. To me it sounded like the final surprised, stupid noise made by a Schola Progenium cadet when he suddenly found himself grabbed by the ears and dashed repeatedly against marble steps.

‘What we forgot… what cost us… was that Lord Skurvithrax had been chosen by Nurgle, as well.’

I could almost imagine for just a moment that he was a human somewhere beneath that armour. I could imagine a faraway look in his eyes. I could imagine a wry twist to his mouth, self-deprecating, wise in retrospect.

‘We…’ – he gurgled a bit, still unmoving – ‘chose poorly. We followed the wrong man. We fought, we lost. But as we do not kill those who accept Grandfather Nurgle’s embrace, in his cruelty, Skurvithrax did not kill us.’

I heard a rusty creak and saw Fecht’s head move ever so slightly, his wet gaze rising above the capital city.

‘We were vomited from the fleet instead of killed. Spat here. Marooned here. Challenged here. I told you once, boy, that we must earn the stars again, and the glorious, lethal darkness between them. We must endure this pathetic pastoral world. We must infect it. We must befoul it. We must earn the favour of Lord Skurvithrax by earning the favour of the Plague Lord anew.’

Another rusted screech, and he nodded towards the far-off city lights.

‘And we will do it there.’

Dastignon was a gentle, fertile world. Fecht did not face a great hive, or a grand fortress, or an impressive military base. He faced just one proper city, one real population centre, and it existed almost entirely to oversee the gathering of grain from distant settlements, the sorting and storing of that grain, and the distribution of it to the merchant fleet that brought it to neighbouring worlds. The beating heart of Dastignon was that capital city, and we held that heart in our hands. All that remained was for us to hold on and squeeze.

The final days of our march, Fecht sent out foraging parties in earnest. Kerrj led some, Eraston others, and Helmynth tended the flock that remained and whipped them ever forward at our master’s tireless, gruelling pace. For weeks we had been taking what we could and fouling the rest, but the time was nearly upon us to take more, and more, and more. To not merely sour, but to stockpile. To prepare for a siege.

We dug in in the hills outside the capital.

Our camp blossomed like a beautiful cancer as the days passed. Far-off foraging parties delivered us their food, just as far-off farming colonies had for so long delivered it to the capital. Trenches were hewn, campfires lit, shrines assembled and fluids spilt. Helmynth and his choir raised their voices in sevenfold discord and proselytised, twisting the bodies of the faithful to match their filth-touched souls. Japing, dancing little nurglings splashed in our gathered filth. Kerrj stalked here and there, eager for blood, praying for intruders that could taste his viscous slimes. Fain stood like a statue in the heart of our camp, waiting for the order to slaughter. Eraston skulked about the perimeter, a shadow among shadows.

The next burst of violence almost came from within our ranks. Compared to our rampage across the countryside, laying half-a-siege was dull, dreary work. It did not take long for patience to wear thin and tempers to flare. Bickering and butchery between cultists and Nurgle-touched mortals was one thing, but when the bloodshed threatened to climb the ranks – when two of Master Fecht’s lieutenants nearly killed one another – I, as Scrivener, took note.

Kerrj Maggotfill and Eraston stood in a stalemate when I arrived. I never knew just what had set them off. No one heard their exchange beforehand, or at least no one heard that would tell me. I can only write on what I saw: the pair of them frozen in a tableau, face to face, Kerrj looming over the slighter renegade, standing so close that the slick tongue protruding from his breastplate swiped and left a slime trail across Eraston’s black armour and the runes etched upon it.

‘You are no true believer.’ Maggotfill’s voice, angry and moist all at once, carried far. ‘I hear you! Bargaining with Grandfather, not begging from him? Not laying yourself at his feet?’

The Death Guard had his wicked, rusted cleaver propped up on one shoulder, ready to bring crashing down. He leaned in closer still somehow, and the gust of wind from his rebreather – moist exhalations that would have killed any human on the planet – served merely to ruffle Eraston’s dark hair.

‘Do you think you are better than us? Better than me?’

‘Think? No,’ Eraston replied softly with the slightest shake of his head and shift of his posture. Kerrj stiffened as he felt a slight tap. ‘I know I am.’

The pair of them were suddenly lit from below by a harsh blue-white glow, and a high-pitched whine rose above the background sounds of the camp. Eraston held his plasma pistol snug against the Plague Marine’s swollen belly, the muzzle of the ancient weapon grinding and grating against the filthy green armour, metal on metal. The pair of them froze and the world held its breath. If Maggotfill tested the speed of his plague-kissed cleaver against Eraston’s relic plasma pistol, there was no telling how it might end. The only sure thing about such a fight was that one of them would die, or just as likely, both.

Fecht’s tent rippled and spasmed, and he burst from within it, furious and stern.

‘Enough.’ The champion’s voice was like a stone being grated against a rusted sheet of metal, the thunderous footfalls of his armour as he stomped over sounded like the impact of a skull on chapel stairs.

‘Stop this, or Fain will.’

The Terminator stirred only just enough, half-head turning to stare at the standoff with his missing eye, an arm lifting his underslung reaper autocannon to point straight at them. Within the wheels and barrels of the gun, wet things writhed and wriggled with murderous anticipation.

Kerrj’s rebreather hissed steadily and he didn’t back down. Something terrible slithered in Eraston’s hard eyes at the ongoing challenge; the shadows of his face had turned long and dark from the plasma pistol’s harsh light. His nostrils flared slightly, almost matching Kerrj’s bull-snorts… the moment stretched itself out, pregnant with violence… and then Eraston simply let out a quiet sigh.

He thumbed a lever on his plasma pistol. The blue-white light faded as the power of a star flowed back into the relic weapon’s wriggling, ready coils.

‘I have work to do,’ Eraston said, looking away from Kerrj only to nod tersely at Fecht. ‘And a debt to pay.’

Kerrj stood there for a long moment as the smaller renegade turned and strode away, and everyone in camp knew he was considering wielding the plague spewer that was, as always, mucus-stuck to his backpack within easy reach. I had seen sprays from it open metal before, and the things it did to flesh were truly sacred. One vile burst could, perhaps, cut down even Eraston.

An eyeball on Kerrj’s shoulder pad opened past a cake of discharge crust, and stared at the looming, waiting Fain. It gave a rheumy blink, took in the Terminator, then closed, as if hiding.

‘If you have no orders for me…’ Kerrj gave Fecht the barest of nods, and only just barely received one in return, before turning to stomp away.

I knew insubordination when I saw it. I knew trouble when I recorded it with bone-scratching pen and glistening ink.

I dared to speak up, asking Fecht about it later, as we walked the perimeter and inspected the camp. Maggotfill had been put back to work to keep him busy. He was overseeing it as our industrious farmers converted long-range grain haulers into fortifications to block the roads more permanently, to shore up our defences, to trip up planetary defence tanks and personnel carriers. Saws screamed in the night air, and all manner of welding tools spat fire and gnawed at steel.

‘Kerrj is impatient. He should not be. He knows better. The mutiny, the failure, it has him… confused. Over-eager. The Death Guard do not rush,’ Fecht told me, and I wrote hurriedly. In the distance, something terrible and wonderful made an impossible noise near the heart of our camp. Helmynth’s choir raised their voices to harmonise with the cacophony. ‘We advance when we choose, and at our own pace. We outlast. We are patient. We can be. We know that, in the end, every battle is already won. We need only live long enough to see the victory.’

Another scream from behind us split the air, and I recognised the tone of the choir’s throat-rending hymns. Steel was not all our cult was working to shore up our defences. Orrin Helmynth was praying and sacrificing, making more mutants, delivering more gifts, hardening and twisting and warping more of our new-sworn brothers and sisters. If Fecht even heard it, he gave no sign.

‘Our plan now calls for patience,’ he said, voice thick and metallic from behind his slick, half-rusted helmet. ‘We have severed the capital’s arteries as we have destroyed rail lines, we have grabbed the capital’s throat as we have closed roads. Now we need only choke them. We have cut off half their inbound food. We force the planetary governor to make a choice. An impossible one, knowing the consequences as they do.’

Fecht’s plague fist flexed at his side, metal hissing. He held a world in that hand.

‘Dastignon can feed itself or it can feed the sector. It cannot feed both, not with what we have fouled, with what we have taken, with the half a continent we have denied them. If they tithe, they starve, and when they are weak we will kill them. If they do not tithe, if they seek to hold out against us, other worlds will die. And then the Imperium will come and try to kill us both.

‘They will try, for a time, to appease the hungers of the sector. The farms to the east will clog their roads with traffic, loads of cargo will hurry back and forth from the city to what countryside they can reach. Ships will go, heavy with grain. The people of the capital will see it leaving, even as they ration. Their bellies will knot with hunger. Their resolve will weaken. Ours never will.’

Fecht made a noise like a satisfied grunt, and I hurried after him to finish our inspection of the perimeter. As he travelled the camp, a cloud of flies and a hushed murmur of respect accompanied him. The cultist troops laughed and boasted and fought one another for Kerrj’s amusement. The faithful threw themselves to the sludge to avert their gaze from Helmynth the would-be Tallyman, or lifted their voices in his praise.

Time passed. Days became weeks. We could only watch as ship after lumbering merchant fleet ship lunged its way into space, near enough to see but far enough that we could not reach them. Each one left with not merely a hold full of much-needed grain, but knowledge of our raid. Each one left with a message that would bring us doom if the might of the Imperium descended upon us. Each one left, and we festered in camp and did nothing. Our morale rotted.

Fain waited, mindless, inhumanly patient, the most dangerous monster on the planet. Kerrj stalked the camp, the terror of our own cultists, belching vitriol and spewing lethal bile everywhere he went. Eraston, clever but impatient, was nowhere to be seen. Brother Trayson openly cursed the renegade, refuting his loyalty, sowing doubt even as he brutally maintained what passed for order.

Orrion Helmynth preached. He preached impatience and disobedience. Mutiny. It spread, it festered. Fecht allowed it to do so.

I sat with Master Fecht inside his field tent, a red, silken thing taken from an enemy colonel. The front flaps were entirely open, the reek of the camp allowed to flow freely into the shelter. The wind that carried Helmynth’s sermon rippled the walls of the tent, making it quiver as if we were inside the twitching organ of a great pink beast.

One in its death throes, according to Helmynth.

‘We will die here! We will fall, on this rock, without glory being given to ourselves or to our wretched, wonderful Grandfather! This tranquil, fertile world’ – he spat each word as if it left a foul taste in his mouth – ‘this place will be the grave of us, of our whole band, if we do not act! Even the disloyal wretch Eraston saw it, and he slipped away, a clever rat, abandoning us!’

I wrote it down, every dangerous word. Master Fecht stood and watched, as still and silent as Fain, while Helmynth raved.

‘Even as I speak,’ the would-be Tallyman growled, gesturing behind himself with his scythe, ‘another ship lifts off! Another chance for the stars slips through our fingers! Another opportunity to spread Nurgle’s blessings flies off instead, to feed. To nurture. To succour.’

He spat.

‘What is that? Four, now? Five? How many more? How many more ships, filled to the brim with Dastignon grain, will be fed to our enemies? Fed to the troopers of the Astra Militarum, to the foot-soldiers of the False Emperor? Fed to his priests, his warriors, his loyal and faithful servants, that they might all grow healthy and hearty from this world’s bounty?’

His choir hissed and cursed at the very thought. Brother Trayson, not so long ago a drill abbot himself, but an abbot all the same, roared his displeasure. Fecht stood, silent. Patient. Unflinching.

‘I say enough! I say no more!’ Helmynth swung his scythe, no longer pointing behind him towards the city – where, yes, a grain ship was ponderously lifting into the air – but now gesturing with it straight at Fecht. ‘In the name of the Plague God, I do challenge thee! In the name of the Lord of Decay, I do seek thine title and command, champion! In the name of the Plaguefather, I do state, thou art unfit for rule!’

‘Finally.’ Fecht’s voice rang out, satisfied at last to see the boil lanced. ‘You find your courage. Let us do this, then.’

The champion loosed a raspy growl as he advanced. The plague fist on his right hand flexed in a gesture that waved Fain away from interfering.

Helmynth, expecting just such a wave and anticipating the opening it offered him, swept in with startling speed, scythe leading the way.

And like that, battle was joined.

They clashed, twin lords of decay, twin beasts of corruption, twin champions of the Master of Plague and Pestilence. Death Guard. Plague Marines. Heroes in phlegm-green armour, twisted and warped and blessed by Grandfather Nurgle with the sickly sweet gifts of his favour. They were both implacable, both inhumanly strong, both masters of war and death and veterans of a hundred times a hundred battles. As is so often the case when those truly gifted in killing cross swords, the fight was over quickly and brutally.

I saw the combination unfolding just a few blows in. Helmynth swept his great, double-headed scythe through a deadly pattern of blows. Seven of them. Meant to maim, then cripple, and only finally, at the very end, kill.

‘You take their legs, that they may meet Nurgle on their knees,’ he had told us, weeks and lifetimes before. I watched as his rune-crusted scythe arced through the air to slash against Fecht’s armoured knee, slicing deep and screaming as it met his Nurgle-blessed armour. Fecht stumbled, off balance, in a shower of sparks. One.

‘You take their weapons, that they may not end their own lives,’ Helmynth had preached to our group of wide-eyed, eager progena. I watched now as his terrible weapon sliced and slashed, blasting against and angling away from the power field rippling around Fecht’s massive plague fist. Fecht responded, but too slowly, his bulk and mass a flaw, not a virtue, against the faster, more aggressive Helmynth. The priest sliced again and again, hacking at the fleshy tubes and wriggling lines that linked the relic power fist to Master Fecht’s backpack and the unholy energies stored therein. The energy field let out a sound somehow both electric and wet, and then died. Two, three, four, five.

‘You take their belly, that nurglings might play in their entrails.’ Helmynth’s lesson came back to me as his twirling scythe slashed low across Fecht’s armour, a narrow slice, but a slice. Fecht’s Death Guard breastplate groaned like a living thing in pain, and it wept clear fluids. Six.

‘You take their heart, if they refuse to give it to the Plague Lord!’ That final line, the choir sang for their master, their voices rising in prayer, sopranos sending their song to the skies above, basses and baritones coughing and growling below.

Helmynth spun, stepped into the strike, and swung the great scythe dead-on, stabbing, not slashing, to bring the point crashing against Fecht’s breastplate. The rune-etched scythe, powered by all of Orrion Helmynth’s faith and pride and hunger for power, won. The cross-section where the two scythe blades met, back to back, clanged against Fecht’s armour, the entirety of one whole blade stabbing straight into my master’s chest. Fecht fell to one knee, slammed downward by the sheer force of the inhuman blow. Blood and pus and other, viler, liquids spewed out, gushed out, poured out to pool in front of him and drip down the scythe’s handle.

Seven.

Helmynth left it there, profanely wedged into Fecht, the long grip of the scythe propping the massive body upright. He spun to exhort his crowd of cultists. They paused for a moment, then roared their praises to Nurgle. Helmynth lifted his arms and his voice – swallowed by the crowd, but praying for certain – and felt all the power and glory of being a Tallyman as his loyal followers screamed their adoration. He stood before them, head thrown back, soaking in the majesty of his moment.

He did not know they weren’t adoring him. He did not see what they saw.

Behind him, Fecht shuddered. His body racked with something like a cough, and a waterfall of fluids gushed down his chest from beneath his helmet.

Impossibly, ponderously, Master Fecht stood.

Unpowered or not, Fecht’s plague fist reached out and grabbed Helmynth’s thrown-back head. The would-be Tallyman let out a surprised little gurgle as he was wrenched off his feet. The tubes and cords that nominally tied Fecht’s fist to his power pack writhed and twisted like a handful of snakes. The power in the relic plague fist came from within, not without. The power came from Fecht and his trust in Nurgle.

‘Fool.’ Fecht’s voice was wetter and harsher than ever before, but also deeper, somehow more powerful. I knew in the slippery, slime-covered depths of my soul that he had fallen a champion, and risen something more. Something worse. Something blessed and blessed and blessed again.

‘Do you think blood is still the sludge that wets my guts? Do you think it is still a heart that pumps it?’ Fecht shook Helmynth as if his brother Plague Marine was an infant. ‘Do you think I am only muscle and sinew and bone, still?’

He pulled Helmynth – feet barely touching the ground – towards him, almost in an embrace. The jutting-out blade of the double scythe gleamed slickly. Fecht pulled and pushed as Helmynth struggled weakly. Ineffectually. Pathetically. Fecht dragged the smaller Plague Marine against his own blade, protruding profanely from Fecht’s chest.

‘Do you think Nurgle is worshiped with words and prayers? Do you truly think you worship Nurgle at all?’ Fecht gurgled and growled, his voice the most glorious, terrible thing I had ever heard. ‘Fool! Pup! Weakling! You worshipped only yourself! You believed in only yourself!’

Fecht finished pulling and pushing, sawing, and Helmynth’s own scythe finished its cut. Helmynth’s body and armour fell to the stones with a sound like a metal bucket full of hog slop.

The champion held Helmynth’s head up high with one armoured hand.

‘You do not worship Nurgle by counting! By singing! By praying! You worship him by enduring! By believing in him! Most of all, by doing his work!’

Fecht squeezed and squeezed, and Helmynth’s head burst apart in the palm of his hand. He grunted and threw the crunchy-wet remains over the crowd, towards the city. He gurgled and coughed and raised his voice to bellow to his cult as a lucky few were spattered.

‘That’ – he pointed at the ever-retreating speck of a far distant cargo hauler – ‘is not the fourth ship to leave since our arrival, or the fifth. If any fool in all the warp should have known, it should have been him – that ship is the seventh.’

His other hand grabbed the haft of the scythe.

‘Seven ships have scarred these skies since our arrival, but they have not escaped our grasp.’ He began to work at the embedded scythe blade, and the length of metal screamed against his armour as he withdrew it slowly, painstakingly, from his chest. ‘And Eraston has not abandoned us.’

‘He is there. In the city. Doing… nrghl…’ He heaved the blade free of whatever quivering wet things lived in the cavity of his breastplate. ‘Doing what he does. Doing what we cannot, without his softer, lighter touch. Doing as I bargained and bid him, and spreading Grandfather’s gifts.’

Fecht straightened as he slammed the butt of the scythe against the ground, and he stood taller than ever.

‘Those ships have been pregnant with filth. Seeded with sickness. They have been blessed by Nurgle, and will spread that blessing across the system. Seven ships, seven gifts sent in Nurgle’s name. And now one of them remains at port. Waiting for us. Waiting for us to show our strength and take it.’ His impassive, featureless helmet swept the crowd, his steely gaze settling on Kerrj, the only one left who might ever dare to challenge him. The junior Death Guard did not rise to the occasion. Neither, though, I must record, did he refuse to meet that glare. ‘We have had time to grow impatient? They have had time to grow sickly! Tired. Weak.

‘Strip him.’ Fecht gestured towards the corpse at his feet with his plague fist, slick with red and grey slime, shining like the stairs to a far-off chapel. Orrion Helmynth looked small. ‘Carve him. Section him. Burn him, that he be denied the rot.’

The crowd murmured, a collective gasp taken in at the terrible insult being offered. The creatures that had once been choir-singers hissed and lunged to obey, though, tentacles and claws grabbing and prying to part steel from flesh. Some would die from inhaling what they found beneath the armour, but they knew all would perish if they didn’t prove their loyalty.

‘By the time the meat has cooked from his bones, we break camp.’ Fecht turned his helmeted face towards the capital.

‘Now is the time! Nurgle has been gifted seven ships, and the time comes for us to reap our own harvest!’ he bellowed, raising the gore-slick scythe. ‘We have a city to kill, and a ship to claim!’

I scribbled so fast that I broke a long-bone quill. I hurried to write down all of Master Fecht’s speech – such a rarity! – and all the while I longed to take my tools to Helmynth’s corpse, to harvest his juices, to sharpen his bones. Whatever beautiful carnage we wrought in the city, whatever blight we spread from Dastignon into the stars, whatever great and terrible deeds Master Fecht had planned for us next… I would be the one to record them. I had earned that right. I had claimed my own immortality.

About the Author

Russell “Rusty” Zimmerman is a grizzled merc with a keyboard, a writer-for-hire slinging words for whoever pays his bloody price. He’s been particularly prolific in the Shadowrun and BattleTech universes, and is excited to be [redacted] for [redacted]. He lives in NYC with his lovely wife. ‘Seven Ships’ is his first story for Black Library.

An extract from The Lords of Silence.

‘One, two, three.’

He moves, slowly. His claw reaches out, pushing through debris. Lights flicker – sulphur-yellow, intermittent like a failing heartbeat.

‘Four, five.’

He does not want to count. His lips move, unbidden, rehearsing well-trodden paths, stabilising his nervous system. Numbers have power – the subtle know this – but still he does not want to do it.

‘Six.’

He pushes himself free of the piles of metal, the heaps of flesh and iron. His boots, cloven like devil hooves, find purchase and push back. He drags himself out of the ruins, his breath wheezing through a rusted vox-grille.

‘Seven.’

That is the perfect number, the one that signifies the accomplishment and the end, but also the conception and then the process. It gives him strength, though he does not wish it to. It has always given him strength, even before the long change, and he dimly remembers this. Now, it is just a habit. So many things are just habits now.

He gets back to his feet. Detritus sheds from his back, clattering on the deck. Warning klaxons are sounding from somewhere, muffled and broken. A length of cable as thick as a torso hangs from the roof, glittering with a weak mantle of sparks. The grav field is off-kilter. He feels lighter than he should. His old plate should be heavy. It is crusted with the patina of age, thickened and fleshed, scabbed with boils and laced with glistening strings of pulled marrow.

He staggers over to a servitor station and sees the wretched operator fused to the deck, its fingers locked into a cat’s cradle of sensor plugs. It’s dead now, the last strobes of its cortex blown out, which is probably for the best.

He presses fat fingers to the command console, summoning status runes across greasy picter crystals.

He sees that the ship lives. He sees that Solace’s enemy is no longer in view. He wonders how much he aided the starship, or if this is just one more sign that things are running away from him.

‘Dragan,’ he voxes, and gets nothing but static back over the link.

Others are beginning to stir now. He sees one of his kindred emerge from under a sagging beam, helm lenses glowing vivid green in the dark. He sees a servitor twitch back into life, its bulbous stomach spilling across a disc-shaped tactical column. He sees a Little Lord plop down from a fizzing cluster of cabling. It shrieks as it splats on the deck, and he gathers it up carefully. It coos at him, and then nuzzles into the crutch of his elbow, snickering needle-teeth.

He is beginning to remember now. He is beginning to piece things together again. Is he slower now than he once was?

The Little Lord starts to lick the blood from his cracked ceramite.

Of course he’s slower. Everything is slowing down, congested, like running through water. That’s the Gift, of course. That’s one of the great objectives.

Vorx turns on his heel, patting the Little Lord absently.

‘Lumens, if you please,’ he grunts. ‘Get us moving.’

The bridge responds. Crew stagger out of the dark, pull themselves up from behind half-melted cogitator stations, wipe sweat and mucus from their eyes.

Around them, Solace starts to come to life. It’s hard to kill a ship like this. It’s hard to kill any of them.

‘One,’ he mutters, starting again.

Dragan gets to his knees, snarling. A gun-crew slave staggers over to him, perhaps trying to help him. This is a conceit, and he shoves the emaciated human into the wall, hears the faint snap of something osseous breaking. Then he’s turning, drawing himself up to his full height. The gun cavern yawns away from him, its roof lost in dark clouds, draped with rotting cables like spider threads.

Something big has detonated, hard enough to fry Solace’s grav-generators and throw the virtual axis off-kilter. The ship’s a big, bulky beast, so the damage must have been catastrophic, and close.

He slaps the side of his helm, then again, hard enough to knock some sense back into his incoming visual field. His mood is dark, and he wonders if the explosion was somehow his failure – if so, that’ll be more fodder for Vorx.

The gun gangs are coming back to life. Several dozen lie in the murk of the deck, limbs severed or ribcages smashed. A chain-mounted lumen swings lazily over them like a censer. The nearest gun barrel – a two-hundred-metre-long iron howitzer – rears up through the miasma towards its gunwale sheath. Recoil columns splay out, lodged deep into the substructure. Much of the breech is still made of black metal, a metre thick at its thinnest point, crushingly heavy. Only the edges show creeping evidence of the biological – strands of hair-thin follicles worming away, glacially slowly. They’ll get there in the end, consuming the inorganic and replacing it with the tougher stuff of sinew and cord.

Six metres away, Gunnery Captain Kodad regains his feet. He’s one of the more senior of the Unchanged, and something like a uniform still clings to his hefty frame. His skin is white-grey and boils cluster at his neckline, but he might even pass for human-normal in some of the grimier Imperial hives.

Dragan looks into his smeary adjuster-lens, then down the long rows of howitzers.

‘What’s the damage?’ he growls.

‘Significant,’ Kodad whispers. He always whispers now – some wasting Gift in his vocal cords, most likely. ‘It will take time.’

Dragan grunts. He can smell promethium, mingled with heavier aromas. Solace is bleeding somewhere.

‘Did you get a salvo off?’ he asks.

Kodad looks at him. His black-in-black eyes are unblinking. ‘Six, lord.’

‘Six.’

‘Rather proud of the crews, lord.’

Dragan grunts again. ‘Not good enough, though, was it?’ he snarls, and stalks out towards the exit aperture. His boots suck at the soft fleshy stuff on the deck – the permanent soup of swill that bubbles and ferments in every crevice. ‘I’ll be back in an hour. Any guns still out of action, I’ll flay the loader teams. Get it done.’

Click here to buy The Lords of Silence.

THE BLACK LIBRARY

NEWSLETTER

Sign up today for regular updates on the latest Black Library news and releases

SIGN UP NOW

ENJOYED THE STORY?

RECREATE IT IN MINIATURE!

Get started at Warhammer40000.com

A Black Library Publication

This eBook edition published in 2025 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Alex Boyd.

Seven Ships © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2025. Seven Ships, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-83609-137-0

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
warhammer.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

the purchaser of a Black Library e-book product (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase a Black Library e-book (“e-book”). The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media.

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.