The Master of Mankind
Page 1
Backlist
Book 1 – HORUS RISING
Book 2 – FALSE GODS
Book 3 – GALAXY IN FLAMES
Book 4 – THE FLIGHT OF THE EISENSTEIN
Book 5 – FULGRIM
Book 6 – DESCENT OF ANGELS
Book 7 – LEGION
Book 8 – BATTLE FOR THE ABYSS
Book 9 – MECHANICUM
Book 10 – TALES OF HERESY
Book 11 – FALLEN ANGELS
Book 12 – A THOUSAND SONS
Book 13 – NEMESIS
Book 14 – THE FIRST HERETIC
Book 15 – PROSPERO BURNS
Book 16 – AGE OF DARKNESS
Book 17 – THE OUTCAST DEAD
Book 18 – DELIVERANCE LOST
Book 19 – KNOW NO FEAR
Book 20 – THE PRIMARCHS
Book 21 – FEAR TO TREAD
Book 22 – SHADOWS OF TREACHERY
Book 23 – ANGEL EXTERMINATUS
Book 24 – BETRAYER
Book 25 – MARK OF CALTH
Book 26 – VULKAN LIVES
Book 27 – THE UNREMEMBERED EMPIRE
Book 28 – SCARS
Book 29 – VENGEFUL SPIRIT
Book 30 – THE DAMNATION OF PYTHOS
Book 31 – LEGACIES OF BETRAYAL
Book 32 – DEATHFIRE
Book 33 – WAR WITHOUT END
Book 34 – PHAROS
Book 35 – EYE OF TERRA
Book 36 – THE PATH OF HEAVEN
Book 37 – THE SILENT WAR
Book 38 – ANGELS OF CALIBAN
Book 39 – PRAETORIAN OF DORN
Book 40 – CORAX
Novellas
PROMETHEAN SUN
AURELIAN
BROTHERHOOD OF THE STORM
THE CRIMSON FIST
PRINCE OF CROWS
DEATH AND DEFIANCE
TALLARN: EXECUTIONER
SCORCHED EARTH
BLADES OF THE TRAITOR
THE PURGE
THE HONOURED
THE UNBURDENED
RAVENLORD
Many of these titles are also available as abridged and unabridged audiobooks. Order the full range of Horus Heresy novels and audiobooks from blacklibrary.com
Audio Dramas
THE DARK KING & THE LIGHTNING TOWER
RAVEN’S FLIGHT
GARRO: OATH OF MOMENT
GARRO: LEGION OF ONE
BUTCHER’S NAILS
GREY ANGEL
GARRO: BURDEN OF DUTY
GARRO: SWORD OF TRUTH
THE SIGILLITE
HONOUR TO THE DEAD
CENSURE
WOLF HUNT
HUNTER’S MOON
THIEF OF REVELATIONS
TEMPLAR
ECHOES OF RUIN
MASTER OF THE FIRST & THE LONG NIGHT
THE EAGLE’S TALON & IRON CORPSES
RAPTOR
Download the full range of Horus Heresy audio dramas from blacklibrary.com
Also available
MACRAGGE’S HONOUR
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
The Horus Heresy
Dramatis Personae
Prologue
Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Part Two
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Part Three
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Epilogue
Afterword
Acknowledgements
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
The Horus Heresy
It is a time of legend.
The galaxy is in flames. The Emperor’s glorious vision for humanity is in ruins. His favoured son, Horus, has turned from his father’s light and embraced Chaos.
His armies, the mighty and redoubtable Space Marines, are locked in a brutal civil war. Once, these ultimate warriors fought side by side as brothers, protecting the galaxy and bringing mankind back into the Emperor’s light. Now they are divided.
Some remain loyal to the Emperor, whilst others have sided with the Warmaster. Pre-eminent amongst them, the leaders of their thousands-strong Legions are the primarchs. Magnificent, superhuman beings, they are the crowning achievement of the Emperor’s genetic science. Thrust into battle against one another, victory is uncertain for either side.
Worlds are burning. At Isstvan V, Horus dealt a vicious blow and three loyal Legions were all but destroyed. War was begun, a conflict that will engulf all mankind in fire. Treachery and betrayal have usurped honour and nobility. Assassins lurk in every shadow. Armies are gathering. All must choose a side or die.
Horus musters his armada, Terra itself the object of his wrath. Seated upon the Golden Throne, the Emperor waits for his wayward son to return. But his true enemy is Chaos, a primordial force that seeks to enslave mankind to its capricious whims.
The screams of the innocent, the pleas of the righteous resound to the cruel laughter of Dark Gods. Suffering and damnation await all should the Emperor fail and the war be lost.
The age of knowledge and enlightenment has ended.
The Age of Darkness has begun.
~ Dramatis Personae ~
Hierarchs of the Imperium
The Emperor, The Master of Mankind
Malcador, The Sigillite, High Lord of Terra
Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists, Praetorian of Terra
Magnus the Red, Primarch of the Thousand Sons, Lord of Prospero
Koja Zu, Minister of the Anuatan Steppes
The Legio Custodes, ‘The Ten Thousand’
Constantin Valdor, Captain-General
Sagittarus Malacque, Warrior of the Moritoi
Ra Endymion, Tribune of the Hykanatoi
Diocletian Coros, Prefect of the Hykanatoi
Zhanmadao Navenar, Prefect of the Tharanatoi
Hyaric Ostianus, Warrior of the Kataphraktoi
The Silent Sisterhood
Jenetia Krole, Commander of the Silent Sisterhood
Kaeria Casryn, Vigilator, Steel Foxes Cadre
Marei Yul, Vigilator, Fire Wyrms Cadre
Melpomanei, Proloquor of the Soulless Queen
Varonika Sulath, Mistress of the Black Fleet
The Martian Mechanicum
Zagreus Kane, Fabricator General-in-Exile of Sacred Mars
Trimejia Diadanei, Fabricator Locum
The Archimandrite, Executor Principus
Iosos, Archwright of the Ten Thousand
Arkhan Land, Technoarchaeologist
Sapien, Artificimian
Hieronyma, Magos Domina, Ordo Reductor
Alpha-Rho-25, Sicarii Protector
Nishome Alvarek, Legio Ignatum, pr
inceps of the Scion of Vigilant Light
Enkir Morova, Legio Ignatum, princeps of the Black Sky
The Mongrel Court
Zephon of Baal, Warrior of the Crusader Host
Jaya D’Arcus, Baroness of House Vyridion, Warden of Highrock
Devram Sevik, Courtier, Scion of House Vyridion
Illara Latharac, Courtier, Scion of House Vyridion
Torolec, Sacristan Apex
Imperial Personae
Skoia, Ancestor-speaker
‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.’
– from Tempestium,
by the heretic Ariel Sycorax of Old Earth
Prologue
The Herald
‘Father.’
He whispered the word against the wailing sirens. Lightning arced in panicked flashes between overloading generators, killing men, women and other machines with impunity. His presence was a violation, a profane corruption of the most sacred ground, yet the burden of confusion paralysed him. Weakness flooded his flame-wreathed form as it never had before in his demigod’s lifespan.
The cavern before him was only a laboratory in the most poetic sense. He looked with flaming eyes upon the inside of a god’s mind, where a cityscape of machinery and snarled utopia of cables reflected the synapses and sections of a human brain. At the core was a throne of gold, once coldly serene, now spitting acetylene sparks bright enough to sear even eyes made of fire.
He felt the heat of pursuit behind him, the ripples of the warp’s billion predators spilling into the latticework of tunnels in his wrathful wake. They came in a laughing, howling horde, inexorable as any flood, inevitable as the rolling slide of lava.
And he knew, then, what he had done.
He had led them here. The only being powerful enough to breach the final barriers around the Imperial Dungeon had carved a path and paved a way for them. The warning he had come to give faded from his lips.
The sirens. The sirens howled on and on. Warriors of the Ten Thousand, clad in gold and ringing their king, shouted and fired skywards. Their incendiary rounds dissolved within his towering form, their rage coming to nothing. Even the Custodians didn’t know him. He knew each of them by name – there was Constantin Valdor, there was Ra Endymion, there was Amon Tauromachian – yet they levelled their spears at him and opened fire. Good men, men with philosophical souls and unbreakable loyalty, seeking to destroy him.
His father stood at the heart of the storm, looking up at him, looking up at the burning herald of humanity’s end. Every other soul in the chamber – the menials and workers and scientists not already aflame or fleeing the cascade of klaxons – stared up with their king. The fiery form was the last thing many of them saw, for its violent luminescence stole their sight forever after.
The Emperor looked upon him – His son, His creation – with eyes that had seen countless suns and civilisations die.
‘Magnus,’ He said.
‘Father,’ breathed the avatar of burning misery in reply.
Part One
Magnus’ Folly
One
The first murder
Thirst
Hunger
Two men cry out in a forgotten age. The roar of the slayer harmonises with the scream of the slain. In this earliest epoch, when humankind still fears spirits of fire and prays to false gods for the sun to rise, the murder of a brother is the darkest of deeds.
Blood marks the man’s face, just as it marks the spear in his clenched fists and the rocks beneath his brother’s body. The wound gouts and sprays – the man tastes the red wine of his brother’s veins, feeling the blood’s heat where it lands on his bearded skin, tasting of metals yet undiscovered and seas yet unseen. As the hot salt of spilt life burns his tongue, the man knows with impossible clarity:
He is the first.
Mankind – in all its myriad forms on the thousandfold path from wretched lizard-thing to warm-blooded mammal – has always fought to survive. Even as hunched ape-creatures and brutish proto-men, it waged insignificant and miserable wars upon itself with fists and teeth and rocks.
Yet this man is the first. Not the first to hate, nor even the first to kill. He is the first to take life in cold blood. He is the first to murder.
His dying brother’s thrashing hand reaches for him, raking dirty nails across his sweating skin. Seeking mercy or vengeance? The man doesn’t know, and in his rage he doesn’t care. He drives the wooden spear deeper into the yielding hardness of meat and against the scrape of bone. Still he screams, still he roars.
The scream of the first murderer cuts through the veil, echoing across reality and unreality alike.
To the things that wait in the warp, mankind will never sing a sweeter song.
Behind the veil, the scream takes a carnival of forms, riotous and infinite in variety. The frail laws of physics that so coldly govern the material universe have no power – here, those binding codes fracture into their separate fictions. Here, time itself goes to die.
On and on it plunges, crashing and dissolving and reforming in the endless storm. It ruptures a cloud-burst of other screams that haven’t yet been cried aloud. It punctures the fire-flesh of shrieking ghosts, adding to the torment of those lost and forsaken souls. It knifes through a disease that was rendered extinct by man-made cures twenty-six thousand years before.
And on. And on. And on. Clashing with moments that haven’t yet happened, that won’t happen for half an eternity. Grinding against events that took place back when the earliest Terran creatures exhaled water and – for the very first time – raked in lungfuls of air.
Behind the veil, there is no when and then. Everything is now. Always and eternally now, in the shifting tides of an infinite malignance.
Lights shine in that malignant black: the lights of sentience that draw the darkness closer. The same lights flare and shriek and dissolve at the merest touch from the forces around them. Dreams and memories take shape only to shatter amidst the claws and jaws manifesting within the nothingness.
The scream plunges on through every whisper of hatred that will ever be spoken by a human mouth or thought by a human mind. It cracks like lightning above the sky of a dying civilisation that will expire before ever grasping the wonder of space flight. It breaks the stone city-bones of a culture gone to dust thousands of years ago.
From its genesis in breath and sound the scream becomes acidic nothingness, then fury and fire. It becomes a memory that burns, a whisper that rends and a prophecy that bleeds.
And it becomes a name. A name that means nothing in any language spoken by any species, living or dead. A name that carries meaning only in the strangled, misfiring thoughts of humans breathing their last breaths, in that precious and terrifying moment when their spirits are caught between one realm and the next.
The name of a creature, a daemon born from the cold rage of one traitorous soul in one treacherous second. Its name is the deed itself, the first murder and the death rattle that followed.
In the creature’s shrieking journey across the warp, it touches the minds of every human who ever was and will ever be, from the long dead to those yet to be born. The daemon is tied to the species with such primal intimacy that every man, woman and child knows its caress – deep in their blood and bones – even if they know nothing of its name.
Billions of them stir in their sleep across the many ages of man, writhing against the unwanted touch of the creature’s birth back in the mists of time.
Millions of them wake, staring into the darkness of mud huts, palatial bedchambers, housing complexes and any one of the countless other structures that humans build for themselves across a million worlds and thousands of years.
One of them, a sleeper on Terra itself, wakes and reaches for a weapon.
Her hand slid along cool silk, inch by subtle inch, until she grasped the fam
iliar ivory handle. Something mechanical was purring in her chamber, a droning song in the shadows.
‘Do not draw the weapon,’ said the voice of her killer. ‘You are said to be an intelligent woman, Minister Zu. I had hoped we might avoid such futility.’
The minister swallowed with a click in her throat. She didn’t release the pistol grip. Her hand felt glued to it by sudden night sweat.
How could he be here? What of her guards? A palace’s worth of warriors waited below, armed to the teeth and paid far beyond the threat of her rivals’ crude bribery. Where were they? And what of her family?
Where are the gods-cursed alarms?
‘Rise, minister.’ The voice was too low, too resonant, to be human, nor did it convey anything in the way of human emotion. If statues could speak, they would speak with this assassin’s voice. ‘You know that if I am here, you are already dead. Nothing will change that now.’
She sat up slowly, though she refused to slacken her grip on the gun. ‘Listen,’ she said to the golden shape in the darkness.
‘Negotiation is equally futile,’ the killer assured her.
‘But–’
‘As is begging.’
That set off a spark within her. She felt her features harden as her temper ignited her courage. ‘I wasn’t going to beg,’ she said, her voice cold.
‘My apologies then.’ The figure made no move.
‘What of my guards?’
‘You know what I am, Koja Zu. You can choose to die alone, or you can resist the inevitable and I will leave this palace only after killing everyone who resides within it.’
My son. The thought welled up, bleeding and hot and savage.
‘My son.’ She said the words aloud before she could help herself.
‘He is of an age to serve the Emperor.’
Koja Zu’s hand trembled as it gripped the gun.
‘No,’ she said, and how she loathed herself for the shake in her voice. ‘He’s only four. Please, no. Not the Legions.’
‘He is too young for the Legions. There are other fates, minister.’
Her eyes were adjusting even as her blood ran cold. In the half-light of the hours before dawn she could make out the ornate, overlapping edges of his burnished armour. The suit of golden plate emitted a low thrum, the source of the mechanical purr. In his hands was a long spear, lowered to aim at her. Affixed above the weapon’s arm-length blade was the bulky chassis of a boltgun, clad in reinforced wirework.