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Da Gobbo Rides Again – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter 1

From the viewport, the planet looked a bit like a skull, its ashen plains broken by burning black pits where colossal hives had previously stood proud, the shattered remains of a once bitterly fought-over front line forming its broken teeth below. Stimma reckoned this was deliberate. It was his experience that most things humies made looked a bit like skulls. Like any good Blood Axe, Stimma thought about human things a fair bit, and he reckoned if a humie was in his place, they’d have to admit the planet looked pretty good.

Stimma’s transport to Karanos V was a dreggy little hulk made from welded-together bulk haulers, arranged like the fingers of a massive fist around a fusion core salvaged from some other long-forgotten war. Transit had been an uncharacteristically dour affair: most orks interested in picking over the remains of the planet had already gone, and all that remained were a few week-old yoofs who rattled round the corridors yelling ‘Waaagh!’ at nothing in particular and bothering Stimma with inane questions. Even the warp had been oddly quiet; when the big klaxons went off and the ship was breached, it was by monsters as low-spirited as the orks themselves – dull things that shambled and coughed and complained. What Stimma was hoping would be a nice, invigorating fight – maybe against the red or blue ones, those were his favourite – had devolved into a slow-rolling scuffle.

To their credit the orks had made an attempt to enjoy themselves. The problem was, after your first few jumps, you got used to the horrible things that came squirming through the walls. There were only so many times you could be told that someone was going to fold you inside out, take your blood and skulls, and heap them in a big pile outside your body, before the threat lost its lustre. Stimma had lost an arm and an eye in the fighting; they’d been nicked from his quarters by some other painboy looking to take advantage of the confusion. It was alright, he had plenty more.

Stimma was a painboy. This was more than just his job; it was who he was. You could have taken Stimma’s armour, his bloody apron, his terrifying array of surgical tools, his strange, self-augmented limbs, and shown him to any other ork, and they’d have known he was a painboy. He’d been one since Vakka had gone to the Great Green during that raid against the t’au some time ago. Vakka had taken a railgun round to the chest, cutting his medikal career, and indeed his mortal existence, shorter than he had intended. Stimma had happened to be nearby, yelling at the t’au that they had missed, that their guns were rubbish, and various other insults that may well have been responsible for the firing of the aforesaid railgun round.

Vakka had grabbed Stimma by the collar and pulled him close. ‘You’ve got me killed. Now I’m not da dok any more.’

This was a statement of fact rather than an accusation of any kind. Stimma had nodded, and Vakka had continued.

‘You’re gonna need a new painboy,’ he’d said, jerking his head towards the t’au lines by way of punctuation. Another railgun round had split the air above, before obliterating a battlewagon full of reinforcements rumbling towards the front lines. When the cheering from the nearby orks had died down, Vakka made his pronouncement. ‘Stimma, you’re a cruel little git and I wouldn’t trust ya wiv even me third best grot. You’re cruel, and you’re lazy. So you’re gonna be da new painboy.’

Stimma had made to protest. ‘Boss, I’m no good at puttin’ fings togevva. I don’t even know wot all da bits inside an ork do or how dey fit. And bein’ a painboy is borin’.’

At that, Vakka had grabbed Stimma’s hand hard enough to crack his finger-bones. ‘Tough. Here’s how it was for me, and here’s how it’s goin’ to be for you. Now lissen closely, I’ve got about a squig’s worth of blood left in me, and den I’m proppa dead, not just half-dead.’

The rail-round that had done for Vakka was in fact a near miss – a direct hit, and he would have been little more than bloody vapour and a war cry fading on the wind. The projectile had passed an arm’s length or so from his left side, the blast wave effectively evaporating that half of his body. Vakka, a painboy to the last, didn’t waste the chance to make the most of a really horrible injury. Like a schola-demonstrator leading an amputation, he’d guided Stimma’s meaty hand to each of his organs, explaining what they did, how they worked.

‘Dat’s da wobbler,’ Vakka had said, forcibly placing Stimma’s fingers against a quivering lump of flesh that hung loosely from his ruined flank. ‘It wibbles.’ Then he moved Stimma’s hand up to a cluster of lumpy protrusions deep within his thoracic cavity. ‘Don’t know wot dese do. Usually I just give ’em a poke and den leave well alone. If you find any spare, pocket ’em, you never know when dey might come in ’andy.’

Stimma had initially recoiled from this impromptu lesson in orkish anatomy. This was not out of disgust, but boredom. Stimma didn’t mind gore, but back then, he much preferred making it than mucking around in it. However, as Vakka’s tuition continued, Stimma found himself thinking about the orkish body in ways he’d never considered before. It was like taking apart a slugga – an ork was just another really brilliant machine, one that could be looted and bolted back together and improved endlessly. The heart? That was a bit like a fuel pump, keeping the rest of the organs juiced up and ready to go. The wobbler? Well, that was easy. It wibbled. The brain? Well, it did something important. He could work that out later. Vakka had unfortunately expired before he could get to that bit, but by then, his work was done. Stimma was a painboy now. He Got It.

He did not have to wait long for his first patients. A seeker rocket had collided with a nearby trukk filled with orks who’d decided to confront their boredom with the developing stalemate by driving at it, really fast.

From there, Stimma had begun to master his grim trade. The battlefield, it turned out, was a brilliant place to practise. He’d lurk around the front lines, throwing himself into the nastiest-looking fights. Once everyone else had been beaten up, Stimma would pounce on any orks desperately injured enough to let him have a go at putting them back together, or, at the very least, too mortally injured to stop him. When he succeeded, he took handfuls of teeth as payment. When he failed, he also took handfuls of teeth as payment – after all, it wasn’t like his perished former patients needed them any more.

Slowly but surely, Stimma built a reputation for himself as someone that could mostly be trusted to put your organs back where they were meant to be, or, as it was generally agreed, somewhere more interesting than they were before. He’d set up a nice little dok-shop. He’d assembled a nice little suite of medikal tools. Stimma’s favourite of these was his prized rock-saw, which was nifty when you needed to make a patient’s insides get outside really quickly, like during battlefield surgery, or when they complained about Stimma’s rates. It was here that Stimma got his nickname, ‘Gut-shiv’ – not just because of his preferred surgical methods but his narrow, jagged appearance too. He was tall, and bony for an ork, all lean muscle and bloodstained pockets filled with knives. Like many painboyz, Stimma wore as much of his gear as he could – you never knew when a routine hut-call would require some spare organs, or a nano-scalpel, or, if things got particularly hairy with an unsatisfied customer, a scary-looking shoota. The effect of having Stimma, ostensibly helpfully, bear down on you was a bit like being attacked by a tooled-up scarecrow.

Stimma had soon become famed enough to be sent to Da Konference. Da Konference was a novel idea pioneered by his warboss, Big Zag, partly to show off Stimma’s medikal talents to the other warbosses in the sector, and partly, Stimma suspected, to keep him out of the way. Painboyz, doks and even the squig-wranglers of the Snakebites drawn from the dozens of clans and sub-clans battling in the sector competed in brutal contests of competitive anatomical deconstruction. This allowed the attendees to pick up new skills, and gave the rest of the orks a brief respite from wondering if a painboy was skulking around looking to nick their kidneys.

Stimma had comported himself well at the latest games. His talk on the rudiments of human medicine had been highly controversial. It was generally acknowledged that humies were too fragile to be mended in the same, rather robust manner orks were, and, given evidence observed across countless battlefields, they much preferred to execute fallen soldiers and use their skulls to make lamps and robots and other weird humie gubbinz. Even Stimma’s presentation of some captive ‘mediks’ had failed to convince. After all, carrying loads of knives and being covered in blood wasn’t just something painboyz did; countless other orks, humies and other aliens besides did the same. However, a sudden and violent demonstration of a beakie ‘narf-ecium’– a kind of weird saw-glove filled with drugs – managed to convince a few of Stimma’s colleagues.

It was eventually agreed that humies weren’t very good at doktorin’ compared to orks, but they definitely made a spirited (and entertainingly messy) go of it, and that was good enough.

Da Konference ended as it always did, in a massive fight with no clear winner. Still, Stimma had made off with a big bag of spare organs and some new insights into how orks were put together, so on balance, it was good. He had missed his mates, though. Blood Axes always stuck together, except when they disagreed with each other or somebody else paid them off. Other Blood Axes wouldn’t question why you had a big bag of golden birds taken from humie soldiers in a sack under your bed. They wouldn’t beat you up if you accidentally admitted that a beakie looked cool, or that you wanted to shoot one of their big shootas.

Stimma had been around for the first bit of the Karanos V invasion, but had wisely left for Da Konference in a hurry after botching a key surgery on a particularly influential nob. Despite knowing that most of the fighting with humies was over, he was looking forward to seeing his mates before the fighting with other orks really got into full swing. Even putting aside the ancient and unbreakable bonds of kin, there was a war coming to an end, and that meant lots of loot, lots of corpses to pick over, and lots of orks with missing limbs that were begging for replacements.

Roused from his musings, Stimma watched as the hulk broke through the planet’s atmosphere with a squeal of rapidly decompressing compartments, and once again congratulated himself on choosing a bit of the vessel nearer the middle than the front.

As usual, the landing gear had failed to deploy, the engines had refused to turn off, and the anti-air guns hadn’t been told about incoming visitors, and so the craft had made a crash-landing about a mile or so from the primary ork encampment. Stimma allowed himself a moment before he departed, taking a lungful of the smoky air and enjoying the warning klaxons. It smelled like war. It smelled like home.

He went outside, finding light snowfall, warm lights on the horizon and the kind of quiet stillness that Imperial governors in search of ideal spots for their winter palaces have killed millions for. As far as the aftermaths of planet-spanning conflicts go, it was downright bucolic. To Stimma, this was a sign that something was very, very wrong. You didn’t have to be an expert in taking orks apart to know that the only thing a good ork wanted after a big fight was another, bigger fight. It didn’t help that he was warpsick and battle-hungry – travel had never agreed with him.

Still, Stimma didn’t mind feeling bad. He found that if you really worked at it, you could quite enjoy being miserable. It was like getting a talon proper deep in your ear and digging for wax. A good sulk and a properly foul mood worked wonders for his imagination. On days like this, he would stand perfectly still, scanning his surgery-room with the patience of a sumpkroc, looking for any grots doing anything to really, really hack him off. It was a particularly difficult and exciting game, because often, the joy of catching a grot swapping his stimms for squig-spit, or carving rude words into a patient’s thigh without permission, almost threatened to cheer him up entirely. He’d be halfway through pulling the little git’s head off, then before he knew it, his bad mood – and his inspiration – was gone. Stimma reckoned a grot or three would be a good warm-up before he properly caught up with his mates. Grots could be relied upon for almost nothing except being bad, which was good, because it meant you always had an excuse to kick the snot out of them.

And so, Stimma set to sneaking about, hoping to catch a grot in the act of doing something bad. Stimma was no kommando, but he could lurk with the best of them. He knew that other species tended to laugh at the notion of ‘sneaky orks’ – usually mere moments before their throats were suddenly and violently opened to the elements. Ork stealth wasn’t so much about being quiet, or being unseen. It was about briefly suppressing the inherently chaotic state of being an ork and just… getting around. Sentries expected orks to sneak and creep with the same exaggerated violence they brought to everything else; as the Blood Axes had it, the trick was to just saunter into a trench and cut the throat of everyone in it like it wasn’t a big deal. Stimma put one foot in front of the other. He whistled. He moved just so from shadow to shadow.

The main ork encampment on Karanos V had been one of the planet’s foremost hives. Pummelling from orbital guns had shattered the upper spires; only the base of the hive still stood. This had become the heart of the orkish forces. As the invasion grew, and as orks dragged more and more scrap from the hive’s guts outside, a sprawling shanty town of rusting huts and wrecked bulk landers sprang up. The effect was akin to a huge volcano, a blackened mountain of cratered steel that seemed to vomit more orks and their dwellings from the depths of the earth every day. It was an ever-shifting maze, with plenty of places to hide, corners to skulk around, and blind alleys to mob someone in.

At last, a grot presented itself, hauling a crate of grenades across the icy ground. They bounced and jumped as it went. Stimma emerged from a rusty alcove, and stepped neatly into the grot’s path.

‘Where’d you find dose, den?’ Stimma was certain the grot had stolen the grenades, but it’d be entertaining to see the snot try and lie its way out of a booting.

He was sorely disappointed.

‘Got told to fetch ’em, chief.’ The grot seemed unfazed by Stimma’s questioning.

It didn’t move to hastily hide anything.

It held Stimma’s eye contact steadily.

Even worse – it was apologetic.

‘Sorry to get in yer way, chief. Gotta hurry, don’t wanna be late.’

When a grot said sorry, it usually did so with fear, barely concealed sarcasm, or, most often, both. This grot meant it. Stimma waved it on, too unsettled to harass it any further. It made it a good distance from him, until it slipped on a particularly bad patch of ice, prematurely detonating its transported payload of grenades. Stimma was too disturbed to even properly enjoy the sight, or to fetch any spare parts from the aftermath.

Other grots went by, each laden with salvaged scrap, or crates of fungal brew, or squigs docile enough to allow themselves to be carried from place to place. Each one was as limply obedient as the first and Stimma noticed, with dawning horror, that none of them were stealing. Each one had an excuse, a note, or a nearby ork to back up its story.

Stimma had kept the embers of his temper well stoked on the assumption that he’d be presented with a chance to vent it in short order. Now, he was like a plasma reactor without the emergency cooling systems necessary to stop cataclysmic meltdowns, except a lot less fun.

He decided to resort to active measures. Stimma conspicuously dropped teeth, his weapons, and particularly dangerous medikal stimulants. He loudly observed his own clumsiness, adopting a particularly weedy-sounding voice. He all but hollered how tired his legs were, and how worn out his boots had become from kicking grots, and how he couldn’t possibly do another one, even if he really wanted to.

It was no use. He attracted exactly the wrong kind of attention. Most grots just gave him a wide berth. One even picked up Stimma’s laser-scalpel and handed it back to him. Stimma tried to tell the grot off for touching his stuff without permission, to which the vile runt didn’t even run away. It just looked miserable and offered to tighten Stimma’s bootlaces so they wouldn’t fly off during any particularly hard kicks. Which took all the fun out of it.

He carried on through the ruin of the hive. It really was weird, on closer inspection. There were orks, conducting their usual post-battle rituals of nicking everything, brawling with each other, and making absurd boasts about all the people they’d killed. As usual, grots teemed about their overlords, but they teemed wrong. As far as Stimma could tell, the grots weren’t malingering, bickering or scrapping, but genuinely attempting to be helpful. Orderly queues formed at sloppers and bullet-makers. Orks asked for things to be done, and they were done without complaint.

This by no means made things run smoothly. Quite the opposite – Stimma was looking at a disaster in motion. Ork society ran on fighting, this much was self-evident. It was like the humies. Living under the threat of constant violence kept you vigilant, and kept you motivated. Being sent to oil all the big guns on a slow day was boring. Being sent to oil all the big guns just before (or, if you’d been particularly bad, during) an artillery bombardment was brilliant. Grots ensured that there was a low-level tension present at all times, even during the most tranquil of seasons. You could never really let your guard down around a grot, because if you did, he’d have his hands in your pockets, or a blade in your back – which meant that if some humie tried to do the same, you’d already be on the lookout. If you sent a grot to do a job, you’d know he’d start skiving off almost as soon as you turned your back on him, which meant that you had to keep your eye on that job until it was done. True, when a Waaagh! was in full swing and you were spending bullets as fast as you could scavenge new ones, grots could be coaxed into rapid action for a short amount of time, usually with threats of apocalyptic violence.

This, though… this was different. These grots weren’t scared, not really. Not one of them worked with the jittery efficiency of a grot who has just had the operation and grisly after-effects of a shokk attack gun demonstrated to him on one of his best mates. No, these grots worked more like humies. Not the good ones – the kommissars with their shouty voices and cracking hats and mad, delightful tendency to shoot their friends in the head; or the hulking beakies, violent and battle-hungry even when you’d peeled them free from their armour and stabbed them through one of their hearts. No, these grots worked like snivillians – the vast, confusing underclass of humies that apparently never learned to fight. They were beaten-down, slow things. On the surface, a lot of activity was happening, but not a lot was getting done.

And there was the question of the runtherds. The welfare of grots was usually far, far beneath Stimma’s notice. That fell to another type of oddboy entirely: rarely did one see a gathering of grots without a runtherd prodding them into action.

‘Where ’ave all da runtherds gone?’ mused Stimma.

This was far, far too much thinking, even for a painboy. Stimma had landed in the dead of night; now, the sun was beginning to peek wanly through the great plumes of ash that clogged the planet’s skies, and Stimma was yet to do something horrible. It struck him that this had been the longest single period in his life that he had not placed his hands inside somebody’s chest cavity, by invitation or otherwise.

He made it back to his dok’s hut utterly and miserably without issue. The place was as it was before the orks conquered Karanos V. The landmines outside the entrance had discouraged most looters; Stimma scooped up the remains of those who’d decided to chance it anyway and popped them into his medikal freezer. A body lay on Stimma’s slab – a quick prod confirmed that it was now a corpse. Stimma tried to remember if it had entered the dok-shop that way, and vaguely recalled telling a hulking nob that he was ‘just poppin’ out for a fresh bag o’ blood’ before deciding to go to Da Konference with his subject still strapped to the table. Stimma sighed and popped out his pliers, and prepared to extract payment, only to discover, to his further dismay, that somebody had beaten him to the punch. The nob’s mouth, which should have been a bountiful cavern of teeth, was a gummy wasteland. More unwelcome memories crept into Stimma’s mind – of him taking payment in advance, before promptly spending it on a new organ squig. Stimma didn’t care enough to remember what had happened to it.

He was on the verge of packing it in, walking into a brew hut and declaring that anyone looking for some free surgery was welcome to try and throw a punch at him, when he heard a small, reedy voice behind him coming from a pile of body bags. Stimma had been trying to work out what the humies used them for (he had been bitterly disappointed that they did not always come pre-filled with bodies). The source of the voice was a truly wretched specimen – almost a snotling, really, with chewed ears and countless little scars down its back, presumably from running away from fights.

‘Got any bullets, chief? Me mate’s sick and ’e needs a hundred of ’em or he’ll die.’

This kind of brazen wheedling would have usually just made Stimma cross, but right now, the nasty, lying voice of a grot was as sweet and welcome as the sound of a hundred big guns opening up on an enemy position. Plus, this one was familiar in some way, though Stimma couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

‘You’re lyin’, ain’t ya?’ There was a smile snarling around the corners of Stimma’s mouth, his brain filling with something like relief and the anticipation of kicking something that’d kick back. He managed to twist it into what he hoped was a terrifying grimace.

The grot grinned back, its expression torn between instinctive fear and malicious pride. Nothing about it was remarkable: it was green, smelly, and pointy in the wrong places. If Stimma had been drawing a grot for a medikal diagram, or needed one as a control grot to test a particularly unusual new chemical on, this was the kind of grot he’d choose. It was remarkable for its unremarkability – why had this git been spared the plague of compliance that so blighted its kin?

It hadn’t done anything really bad yet. He could probably clip it round the ear for lying, but Stimma decided to draw it into conversation in an attempt to find out what else it had been up to, and to give it the chance to make it lose its temper.

‘Wot’s yer name, snot?’ said Stimma.

‘Goggulz, boss,’ replied the grot, standing as tall and proud as his gnarled little body would allow.

‘How’s dat?’ asked Stimma. Grots usually got their names from things orks yelled at them – maybe this one was a runaway.

‘On account of da goggles, boss.’ The grot gestured his gnarled claws at his face, indicating, with some pizzazz, where a pair of goggles conspicuously did not sit.

Stimma growled. ‘I can’t see ’em.’

‘Dat’s cos dey’re in yer pocket, boss.’

Instinctively, Stimma patted a pocket. There was something there. He vaguely remembered pulling a tiny pair of goggles out on the ship over, and assuming that he’d had a much smaller head until recently and hadn’t noticed. The possibility he’d nicked them off a grot did feel at least equally plausible.

‘Did I take dese, Goggulz?’

‘Yeah, boss. Stringbag was complainin’ about gettin’ guts in his eyes and said it wasn’t fair I got ’em. So you took ’em off me to shut me up. And den clapped Stringbag and took his bag off ’im.’

Stimma nodded. He didn’t remember the specific incident, but it was representative of the wisdom and professionalism he brought to his dok-shop. ‘Where’s Stringbag now?’

‘I strangled ’im, boss. For gettin’ me goggles nicked.’

‘Good lad. Always hated Stringbag.’ Stimma had. Stringbag was always complaining about the orderlies not pulling their weight, which was Stimma’s job.

‘Thanks, boss. Any chance of a reward?’

Stimma took the goggles out his pocket, inspected them, made direct eye contact with Goggulz, and put them into his other pocket. Goggulz may have been the last grot on the planet worth talking to, but it was important he knew his place.

‘Cheers, mate,’ said Goggulz, with obvious malice, and a slight tremble of fear. That was good. Stimma would need to be sharp for the work ahead.

‘Goggulz,’ said Stimma, ‘I’m gonna give you a kickin’.’

Goggulz grimaced, dismayed but evidently not very surprised. Stimma had trained him well.

The grot cringed, a moment passed, nobody was kicked. In the end, his curiosity got the better of him. ‘Why… why ’aven’t you done it yet?’

‘Savin’ it for later. Dere’s somefing wrong we need to sort out first.’

Goggulz looked curious. ‘What’s dat den?’

‘Don’t da grots seem a bit… weird? Dey keep doin’ what dere told.’

‘I don’t know anyfing about dat, boss,’ said Goggulz, looking both shifty and genuinely confused. It was clear that this grot, after a lifetime of being thumped for disobeying orders, was a little nonplussed to find that grots doing what they were told was equally troubling to its orkish masters.

Goggulz attempted to sidle off, but Stimma snared him with a gnarled claw. ‘Dat’s it exactly! Da grots should be sneakin’ round like you are. But dey’re just… bein’ normal. Which is weird.’

Goggulz, defiant, refused to be drawn on the question. ‘Dis is all seemin’ a lot like work, boss. Why don’t you just tell da boss somefing’s wrong and let ’im sort it out? Den you can just muck about for da rest of da day.’

This was the kind of insight that made grots such invaluable advisors. Stimma would never have considered just making whatever was happening with the grots some other ork’s problem. The two set off to do just that.

Stimma already felt better with Goggulz at his side. Already he’d had to stop the little git sneaking off to do something else, and he complained constantly about the cold and how bored he was.

‘I wasn’t lyin’ about me mate. He really does need a hundred bullets,’ whined Goggulz.

‘Who’s yer mate, den?’ said Stimma, humouring the grot.

‘Well, it’s not so much me mate, as me, but–’ started Goggulz.

‘Right,’ interrupted Stimma before the grot could justify himself. ‘And wot do ya need a hundred bullets for?’

‘Tradin’ for stuff. Not like I can use teef, is it.’

‘Not unless you start takin’ ’em off orks.’

‘I’d have to kill ’em first to do dat, wouldn’t I, boss? And I’d never do a fing like dat.’ Goggulz puffed out his chest, and glinted evilly at Stimma.

Stimma ruffled Goggulz’s ears. ‘You’re proppa horrid, ain’t ya?’ His tone was full of admiration. Goggulz really was horrible. Stimma liked that in an orderly. It made them better at surgery, and you never felt bad when you needed to get rid of one.

‘Tell you what, Goggulz. You want a bullet, I’ll give you one after we’ve fixed da grots.’

‘And after you’ve given me a kickin’, boss.’

‘Dat’s right,’ grunted Stimma, approvingly.

They made hard going through the thick snow and ash. It cast the orkish encampment and the ruins of the hive in an eerie tranquillity, muffling the distant detonations and bellowed challenges that usually marked the aftermath of an ork incursion. Broken structures and stripped-down humie vehicles poked from the snowdrifts, bringing to mind shattered, blackened teeth in the mouth of a corpse.

‘Innit cold?’ said Stimma, to nobody in particular. Karanos V had once been a temperate world, or, at the very least, temperate enough for Imperial planners to house a trillion or so people there, which was to say that you wouldn’t freeze or burn to death if you went outside – at least, not immediately. However, the arrival of the orks and the war they had brought had changed this. The finer points of complex climatological interactions that comprised a nuclear winter were lost on Stimma, but he understood this much: if you got a planet really really hot, it’d get cold after. He thought it was a bit unfair he’d missed the really, really hot bit, and was now stuck trudging through the remains of the fun bit of the war with a grot.

‘Where are da runtherds, den?’ asked Stimma.

‘All dead, boss,’ replied Goggulz.

‘Wot killed ’em?’ Stimma suspected he was not about to get a useful or truthful answer.

‘I did, boss,’ said Goggulz, with some pride.

‘Stop lyin’,’ growled Stimma.

Goggulz looked vaguely apologetic, but his eyes still glinted with malice. ‘Well, cold did for two of ’em, and a bunch of ’em didn’t survive tryin’ to krump da humies, but I got who was left.’ He grinned, revealing a smile of tiny, razor-sharp teeth.

Stimma shook his head. He supposed this was what he deserved for asking a grot an earnest question. Still (not that he’d ever admit it), he was grateful for the distraction. Because Stimma was going to see the warboss – and, if he was lucky, he’d survive the meeting.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2023.
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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.