Contents

Cover

The End and the Death: Volume II – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

i

The Dance Without End

A masque has come to Ulthwé, the first masque since the Fall.

It has come without summons, like a gift: a harlequinade of the Rillietann, the first seen in centuries, stepping from the slanting light of a far-angled gate, and walking in silence through the wraithbone chambers of the craftworld to the Ovation. There, without preliminary or overture, they start their performance.

The asuryani of Ulthanash Shelwé gather to behold it. Some ask, What is the meaning? Is this a blessing, or a portent? Some ask, What is this dance?

Eldrad Ulthran knows. Though the Harlequins have remained hidden in the webway since the Fall, wards of the Laughing God Cegorach, their dance has never ended. They have danced in seclusion, maintaining the old masques, such as The Penumbral and The Leering Moon, and adding new ones, such as The Dance Without End. He has never seen that masque, but he has heard tell of it. It is the great rite of lament, added to their repertoire during the years of seclusion, for it depicts the tragedy of the Fall.

Eldrad comes to the Ovation to stand with the others and watch. The Ovation is his favourite place on Ulthwé. Of great compass, it is the only chamber on the craftworld that feels as though it is outside. Here, there is a wide span of sky, a soft sunset, and a broad tract of eitoc grassland nodding in an idle breeze. A ring of soft beige rocks surrounds the grassy bowl of the stage, a kilometre wide. The shadows are long and the dusk muted. All of it is simulated. Psi-engram circuits in the wraithbone deck and soaring dome manufacture this environment from memories, and optical fields make the space feel even larger than it actually is. He stands among the rocks with the others, watching the dance, feeling the remembered sunlight, smelling the recalled scents of eitoc and the wildflowers. Around the imagined horizon, evening thunder rolls, and lightning prowls. But the noise is not thunder, and the blink-flash is not lightning. It is the crackle of active gates far away, around the edges of the room.

The dance is a spectacle of the highest theatre. A full company, troupes of mimes and jesters, of warlocks, of light and shade and in-between, led by their master Harlequin, all clad in dazzling domino suits, all vizarded in the false-faces of their chosen agaith. And with them, the blue shade of a Solitaire, signifying the prestige of the piece. They move across the floor of the grassy bowl in a choreography that is both surgically precise and as fluid as water.

When the dance ends, the dancers promptly begin again, repeating the entire sequence.

Word spreads. Despite the mounting anxiety and the desperate measures of preparation being undertaken across the aeldari diaspora, emissaries come to behold the masque. The first harlequinade since the Fall is a thing of true significance, and must be witnessed. The emissaries arrive through the far-angled gates. They come from craftworlds scaling for reactive war; from others fleeing at maximum impeller towards the galactic hem; from precious crone worlds raising their defences; from shuttered maiden worlds hiding their most precious thoughts in soulglass flasks; from Exodite communities withdrawing to their covenanted places of safety. No matter the crisis, the masque must be attended.

Then no one comes. Sudden squalls of immaterial horror boil and spill through the far-angled pathways. Transit is no longer possible. The old ways are blocked. Eldrad orders the gates closed. Those who are here must remain. Those who have not yet arrived may never come, and many may have been lost en route.

Eldrad has expected this. He is reluctant to admit that he had not, however, farseen it. In the past weeks, farsight has progressively clouded and dimmed, blocked by etheric tumult just as transit is now blocked. The future is either hidden from asuryani eyes, or it is no longer there.

Nechrevort, the emissary of Commorragh, is last to arrive before the gates close.

The Guardians close in at once at the sight of an envoy of the aeldari’s reviled and degenerate cousins.

‘I come to witness, unbladed,’ she says, her scarified palms raised, her smile lethal. ‘Will you deny me?’

‘I will deny no one,’ Eldrad replies, ‘not even an eladrith ynneas. The masque is for our blood, where ever it runs.’ He signals to the Guardians to back away.

‘I think our blood will run,’ she says, as she walks beside him through the nodding grass towards the Ovation. ‘Yours, farseer. Mine. Don’t you?’

‘Your tone is prognosticatory, Dracon Nechrevort. I thought the drukhari had no truck with the farminded arts?’

‘We need no farsight to see the doom come upon us,’ she replies. ‘The mon-keigh have outdone themselves. They will drag more than their own kind to annihilation.’

The masque has been underway for nine days. On the Ovation’s stage, the whirling figures of the company shape agonies and ecstasies with formal precision and sinuous grace. They tumble in the air like birds, they flutter like leaves, they spring and bound, and curve around each other. The domino suits shine and flash, iridescent. When the dance ends, they begin it again, repeating the same suite of symbolic movements.

The sky is carved from smoke, and the breeze tastes of sadness. Eldrad and the kabal dracon join the onlookers on the rock rim. Eldrad sees autarchs look away, shunning the drukhari. He sees exarchs scowling at her presence, and Exodites moving to stand apart. None make menace, for to do so would be to abuse the hospitality of Ulthwé.

The emissary of Iyanden shows no compunction. She steps close to Eldrad, despite the dracon nearby.

‘What have you seen?’ she asks him, quietly, as they observe the harlequinade.

‘Nothing, Mehlendri,’ he replies.

‘Have you looked?’

‘You ask me that, Silversoul? I have looked. There is nothing to be seen. This you know, for, from the fear in your eyes, I know you have looked too. Nothing is visible, and even if it was, what good is it to us? To farsee is to know the yet-to-come. What use is sight alone?’

‘Anticipation, always our virtue,’ replies his visitor. ‘To farsee is to read the path, and from that the steps may be changed.’

He looks at her.

‘I love you for your trust in that,’ he says. ‘Yet I hate you that you still cleave to that idea.’

‘Anticipation has won me many victories,’ she says.

‘Perhaps.’

‘I have farseen defeats, and changed the steps so that Iyanden has arrived instead at triumph.’

‘Have you, Silversoul? Or have your Aspects simply fought harder and prevailed?’

She frowns. ‘I lament to hear the great farseer speak so ill of his art. Why would the asuryani be given the sight to read fate if not to change it?’

‘Because life is cruel,’ he replies.

‘Eldrad,’ she says, ‘I came to Ulthwé to consult you, for Ulthwé sees further than any–’

‘You came to see the masque,’ he says, ‘and that is enough. The Harlequins come from seclusion to dance for us. That tells us all we need to know. A great catastrophe passes through the stars. We will be lucky to survive it.’

‘We have farseen its coming for years. Now it is upon us, there must be something we can–’

‘Now you counsel for action, Iyandeni? When the asuryani have spent years condemning any involvement with the mammals and their wars? We knew they would burn out. We saw that much. This is how it happens.’

‘But on such a scale, Eldrad? Yes, we farsaw their fall. But we underestimated their potential for destructive spite. Their home world, now the focus of their final grief, sinks like a hot coal through the silk of creation and spills the warp. Our sight has dimmed, and the Harlequins come to dance. That can only mean their final fall will be a second fall for us, consuming all.’

‘Then run, Silversoul.’

‘Iyanden runs, Ulthran.’

‘And Ulthwé cannot. We are lodged in the scar tissue of our own mistake.’

‘So you would… give up?’

He turns from her. In the pale air of the simulated sunset, he sees other emissaries nearby watching their exchange with interest. He sees the amused smirk of Nechrevort.

He claps his hands three times.

‘Stop the masque!’ he commands.

The dancers falter and stop. On the Ovation’s stage, the Harlequins glare at him from behind their startling masks, some crouched low, about to spring or spin, some lowering outstretched arms. Only the nodding grasses stir.

Eldrad stands in the moth-light, and extends his arms. His robes melt into vapour. His armour comes to him, soft ribbons of glassy colour that bind and settle upon his limbs and body until he is tight-cased in the aspect of war.

‘I will tell you what I have seen,’ he announces to the gathered luminaries. ‘I will tell you what I have done.’

The Harlequins hiss, and huddle in a lithe mass, arms around each other.

‘Once, behind us on the trodden path, there was a great people,’ he says, ‘of mighty accomplishment and sharp supremacy, who inherited the stars and all that webs between–’

‘Do not school us, Eldrad,’ objects Kouryan of Biel-Tan.

‘–and in their supremacy and accomplishment, they foresaw where their path would lead, yet they did not change the steps or turn aside.’

Mehlendri glares at him, offended. ‘Recite not our shame as though it is an argument against our art,’ she says.

‘Our shame?’ he asks.

‘You speak of the asuryani, in the time before She came to quench her thirst upon us, and this is known, and this is mourned. But it is no argument. Our loss, though the greatest of all losses, simply reinforces the necessity of our craft. What we farsee, we act upon. What is yet-to-come, we recompose. This is the bitter lesson of the Fall. Our pride blinded us. We have heeded our farsight since–’

‘The story was not ours,’ Eldrad replies. ‘I was speaking of another, the younger kind. Their steps are the same, as though they have learned the same dance from us, and now perform it with us, a duet, echoing every move.’

‘They are low things,’ snaps Jain Zar. ‘They are a million years behind us. They seek to ape our past glory, but they will never rise to such refinement. They will wipe themselves out, as a thousand other kinds have done before them. We have avoided their outgrowth as much as we can, and kept out of their affairs. They will soon be gone.’

‘Very soon,’ Eldrad agrees. ‘What concerns us is the manner of their passing.’

He looks at them all.

‘For generations, we have farseen the damnation of the human – yes, let’s call them what they are – the damnation of the human line. These upstarts who, nonetheless, have forged an empire worthy of the name. Their vigour has surprised us. We have watched them repeat the same hubristic mistakes we made. We have awaited their inevitable ruin, for is it not the fate of all species that harness the power of the mind to affect their destiny? I warned of this, Ulthwé warned of this, but you refused involvement. I chose to ignore that decision.’

There is a murmur of dismay.

‘I have manipulated certain parties in an effort to head off this disaster, for I knew then what you know now. Not only the human line shall perish. My efforts, over years of careful agency, have come to little. Some of my actions have been ill-judged, and I have trimmed the skeins of fate to correct them as best I can. But I have tried. Now you protest, in your woe, that it is time to take action. It is too late. The one called Horus Lupercal wields too much power for us to stand against him. I have one principal agent left in play. He has ensured that the forces opposing the Lupercal have one great champion more than they would have otherwise, the so-called Promethean Son. My agent may be able to do more, but I fear not. Our sight is dim because there is no future to observe. We have no choice but to see out the policy you determined, to let them burn, and fight back the flames of conflagration if they come too close to us. Or, if fate is cruel, and the human line does not end itself, then we will prepare to resist a broken species fuelled by Chaos. We have no choice now but to wait. The Harlequins come to dance for us, The Dance Without End, to remind us what we are capable of enduring, for we must endure again, and weep, for it is only proper, the passing of a sentient kind.’

‘Fine words,’ says Nechrevort, breaking the silence that follows. ‘But incorrect in one detail.’

‘How so?’ asks Eldrad.

Nechrevort gestures at the recoiled Harlequins.

‘That, High Farseer of Ulthwé, was not The Dance Without End,’ she says.

‘Tell me what you mean, drukhari.’

‘I have seen the dance,’ she says. ‘The Harlequin troupes may not have left the far-angled ways since the first breath of She Who Thirsts, but they have danced their masques in High Commorragh.’

‘For you alone?’ asks Jain Zar.

‘We made no secret of it,’ says Nechrevort, ‘but none of you seemed to want to come. You would have been welcome. We are not savages. We can honour the terms of masque-truce as well as you. Still, my point is, I have seen The Dance Without End. Three times. And each time I wept in shame and fury at what was lost of us all. I know the steps and forms. This is not that dance.’

‘Of course it is,’ says Eldrad.

‘It is very like, I agree, farseer,’ she replies. ‘The forms of it, the structure, and many of the steps. It follows the same pattern. It has the same number of performers, the same distinctions of light, dark and twilight troupes. The four mimes are still daemons. The Death Jesters are still the harvesters of mortality. It depicts the fall of a race, and the birth of a god. But these nine troupers do not represent the old race. And the Arebennian Solitaire does not represent She Who Thirsts.’

‘No,’ says Eldrad. ‘You are mistaken.’

‘Am I?’ asks the drukhari emissary. ‘I wish I was.’ She looks over at the Harlequins. ‘What is the name of this dance?’ she asks.

‘It is The Dance of the End and the Death,’ hisses the troupe master, the words awkward as though he has forgotten how to speak.

‘And what role does the Solitaire play?’

‘The one that shall be born,’ replies the troupe master with a growl. ‘The new god.’

Eldrad feels a chill upon his skin. It is not a simulation of the room. How has he not seen this? Or has he just refused to see it because the implications are too terrible?

‘What is the name of your role?’ Eldrad asks the hooded soloist.

‘The Dark King,’ the Solitaire replies.

Click here to buy The End and the Death: Volume II.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2023.
This eBook edition published in 2023 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 Neil Roberts.
Internal artwork by Jodie Muir.

The End and the Death: Volume II © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2023. The End and the Death: Volume II, 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: 978-1-80026-880-7

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
games-workshop.com

For Ian Watson.

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.