The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  A shape darkened the mist. Something winged and clawed. Another figure, bloated and horned. And more. Others. A host of inhumanity. The Throne-engines were still cycling down.

  ‘Sire!’ Diocletian pleaded.

  The Emperor closed His right hand into a fist, clenched within His glove. With a harmonious pattern of thunderclaps, every generator within the chamber went dark, their internal mechanics rupturing, starving the Golden Throne of energy.

  The archway that led to humanity’s doomed salvation was nothing more than an ornate doorway, leading to the bare rock of the throne room wall.

  Power failed completely, plunging the Imperial Dungeon into darkness.

  Alone but for the daemon seeking to devour him from within, silent but for the caged beast’s murderous howls inside his head, a golden figure sprinted through the hazy passages of the ancient webway, leaving the Mechanicum’s aborted Unification behind.

  Epilogue

  The Desert

  The sun was a hammer, the desert its scorched anvil. Here the world laboured under the draconic swelter of seething heat, the wind slow-whipping in outraged howls across the dune sea. The barren sky offered no shadow. The lifeless landscape offered no hope of shade.

  A lone traveller walked this realm, his boots scuffing the powdery grit, his cloak rippling in the alkali gusts. He trudged onwards, leaving tracks that marked his passage across the featureless expanse. He never looked back. There would be nothing to see even if he did.

  His journey brought him to the edge of a chasm, a riven slice of the planet’s skin where the world’s tectonics had once pulled apart after warring in grinding uproar. The traveller descended the ravine’s cliffside while the high sun remained in vigil.

  Soon enough, blessedly, he entered a realm of shadow where the sun no longer stared.

  Within the ravine lay the broken bones of a dead city. Silent for so long, free from the ravages of the dusty wind, it echoed only with the sound of the traveller’s footsteps. He passed through this place of mournful memory, careful not to the touch the ashen smears that its fleeing people had become.

  He walked through time-eaten cathedrals to forgotten gods, through fire-fallen palaces that once housed dynasties of kings and queens who laid claim to whole worlds. He walked with no purpose beyond seeing what lay there in the abandoned shadows.

  In the deepest lightless reaches of that slain civilisation, the traveller halted at last. He stood within a cavern several days’ journey below the surface, where the stone walls showed precious few remaining signs of the culture that once thrived here. It wasn’t from here that those ancient monarchs had ruled their realm, but it was the core-place, the heart of their power, that had allowed them to do so.

  Thunder rolled. A week away, far above him, a storm tore across the desert. Dust clattered from the cavern roof, clattering soft melodies of desecration upon dead machines.

  The traveller turned in the darkness, raising an illumination globe clutched in a rag-gloved hand.

  ‘Hello, Diocletian,’ he said.

  The warrior stood in the dark, his spear held in a loose fist. He was helmless, breathing in the earthy smell of a million memories.

  ‘My liege,’ he said. Somehow his voice was a gunshot in the nothingness, breaking the silence in a way the Emperor’s had not. Things moved in the shadows, crawling away from the defiling sound of speech.

  The Emperor walked among the stilled enginery – the sand had blighted everything, even down here – running His gauntleted touch along the fire-blackened metal.

  ‘Sire? What is happening? Why am I here?’

  ‘Do you recognise any of this machinery?’

  Diocletian let his gaze roam over the cavern’s wreckages. ‘No, my liege.’

  The Emperor kept walking, moving from structure to structure the way a man might browse the aisles of librarium. The thunder that shouldn’t be audible this deep in the earth rumbled louder than before.

  ‘There are those in the Cult Mechanicum, among the Unifiers, that surmise I found the core of the Golden Throne here, beneath the sands of Terra. A relic, they venture, of the Dark Age.’

  Diocletian wasn’t sure what to say. He had witnessed uncountable hours of the Golden Throne’s planning and construction processes. Yet, as he said, he recognised nothing here. He didn’t know if that was a flaw in his understanding of the Throne’s genesis among these machines, or simply because this machine crypt had nothing to do with the Emperor’s greatest work at all.

  ‘Perhaps there was merely inspiration to be found, here,’ the Emperor mused softly. ‘The idea taking form, based not on the successes of an ancient race but the failures of our own.’ He exhaled a rueful sound, not quite a sigh, not quite a chuckle. ‘Did I see these machines, how they fell short of their intended purpose, and resolve to create a far superior incarnation? There is a certain poetry to that, isn’t there, Diocletian? The belief that we know better than those who came before us. That we will suit a throne better than they did.’

  ‘Sire, I… Are you well?’

  ‘Or perhaps the idea was mine in its entirety. Any relics of lost ages that have proven useful for their parts being the legacies of dead species that had the same idea, millennia before my birth. In such an instance, each race envisions its own salvation independent of the others, only to discover that other species, other empires, have already failed to save themselves.’

  Diocletian breathed slowly in the dark. ‘Does it matter, sire?’

  The Emperor turned to him, His eyes focusing on the Custodian for the first time. ‘The war is over, Diocletian. Win or lose, Horus has damned us all. Mankind will share in his ignorance until the last man or woman draws the species’ last breath. The warp will forever be a cancer in the heart of all humans. The Imperium may last a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten thousand. But it will fall, Diocletian. It will fall. The shining path is lost to us. Now we rage against the dying of the light.’

  ‘It cannot be this way.’ Diocletian stepped forwards, teeth clenched. ‘It cannot.’

  The Emperor tilted His head. ‘No? What then do you intend to do, Custodian? How will you – with your spear and your fury and your loyalty – pull fate itself from its repeating path?’

  ‘We will kill Horus.’ Diocletian stared at his defeated monarch, illuminated in emberish light of the lumoglobe in his hand. ‘And after the war, we can begin anew. We can purge the webway. The Unifiers can rebuild all that was lost, even if it takes centuries. We will strike Horus down and–’

  ‘I will face the Sixteenth,’ the Emperor interrupted, distracted once more by the machine graveyard. ‘But there will come another to take his place. I see that now. It is the way of things. The enemy will never abate. Another will come, one who will doubtless learn from Horus’ errors of faith and judgement.’

  ‘Who, my king?’

  The Emperor shook His head. ‘There is no way to know. And for now it is meaningless. But remember it well – we are not the only ones learning from this conflict. Our enemies grow wiser, as well.’

  Diocletian refused to concede. ‘You are the Emperor of Mankind. We will conquer any who come against us. After the war, we will rebuild under your guidance.’

  The Emperor stared at him. He spoke a question that wasn’t a question, one that brooked no answer.

  ‘And what if I am gone, Diocletian.’

  The Custodian had no answer. Thunder pealed above them, shaking the cavern and jarring loose a rattling hail of falling pebble-dust.

  ‘My king, what now? What comes next?’

  The Emperor turned away, walking into the darkness of the cavern while the storm hammered the dead city so far above. He spoke three words that no Custodian had ever heard Him speak before.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Afterword

  The war is over. Humanity has lost. Warhammer 40,00
0 – in all its Gothic, towering, Cyclopean, decrepit, doomed, rotting Byzantine majesty – has taken its first irrevocable step.

  Oh, the Horus Heresy isn’t quite over yet. Horus’s ambitions haven’t dried up and vanished, and the Imperium still has to deal with the Chaos-deluded primarch making his way to Terra, but the malignant forces of the warp have achieved their ultimate aim. Humanity’s chance to free itself of the warp has been lost. No matter what happens from now on, no matter how hard the Imperium fights against itself, against its enemies, the laughter of mad gods will echo behind the veil.

  But this isn’t news to you, I’m sure. The central tenet of Warhammer 40,000 has always been the pitting of humankind against itself, the oldest lore hearkening back to that angelic rebellion called the Horus Heresy, where humanity began its long, inevitable decline. Warhammer 40,000 has always been about how the centre cannot hold; about raging against the dying of the light.

  The Imperium of the Dark Millennium, ten thousand years after the Heresy, can’t beat its foes. That was never on the cards. Warhammer 40,000 is the kind of setting where your sins risk breeding very real daemons, where so much knowledge has been lost or sealed away as heretical or dangerous, and above all: where humankind devours itself, day by day, feeding thousands of psykers into the soul-engines of the Golden Throne to maintain the last flicker of the Emperor’s divine will. This is a species sacrificing its future for its present, destroying its own evolution into a psychic race because to evolve, to ascend, is to shine like a beacon to the creatures of the underworld.

  Almost every xenos threat besieging the dying Imperium of Man would be enough, on its own, to eventually seal the empire’s fate – yet one damnation takes thematic primacy and always has. Predatory alien hordes endlessly eat away at the Imperium’s borders, but it’s the taint of Chaos that holds a blade to the throat of every man, woman, and child.

  The Emperor knew this. Freeing humanity from reliance – heck, from as much contact as possible – with the warp was the species only chance at long-term survival. With the death of that dream comes the long, drawn-out death rattle of the species.

  What a cheery thought.

  Heavy stuff, right? I can’t even begin to frame the context for how many involved discussions and back-and-forths with various loremasters I had during the planning and writing of this book. I’ve read every single word ever published about the Emperor, and talked about it all about, say, eight squillion times. When you’re writing a novel about the greatest figure of unimaginable mystery in the entire setting – in either of its main eras – then of course you’re going to need to treat it with some care.

  There were no mandates on what had to be included and what needed to be excluded, but I went into it with a fairly tight focus on the things I wanted to show, and the things I wanted to avoid at all costs.

  The former is obvious. Pretty much everything I wanted to show has been shown; unless you started here then you’ve probably just read the book and are now making your way through my rambling thoughts.

  The latter is a far trickier deal. I’m sure this novel will divide people in terms of its reception. In many ways it can’t help but do that given its subject matter, and I’m accordingly braced for it.

  The fact is (let’s rip this band-aid off right now) I didn’t want to reveal anything about the Emperor as any kind of definitive, objective truth. I don’t think anyone should, either - partly because understanding the Emperor’s nature and origins hasn’t been important for three decades of enjoyment in the supremely popular setting (and it’s never going to be necessary for that), and partly because, well, no answer will ever be satisfying enough or believable enough for everybody. Nothing will match everyone’s massively varied perceptions of the setting, and that’s as it should be. It’s Warhammer 40,000, after all. No one faction is “right” in the setting, it’s all just levels of ignorance and occlusion.

  Between you and me? I find the idea of a single, objective truth for any 40K mystery a little tedious. The fun has always been in exploring the possibility and likelihood of various angles. Could the Emperor have been born from the souls of primitive shamans? Is he a Dark Age construct aping human form, left out to enact his will over the now-ignorant species? Was he a manipulative overlord and tyrant who knew everything of Chaos? Was he just a good man whose intellect strained to work alongside the levels of those beneath him, and was he ultimately failed by lesser beings?

  All of them might be true. None of them might be true.

  It’s the same as when people point to the Dark Foundings and Cursed Foundings and wonder if various Space Marine Chapters are founded on Traitor Legion gene-seed. That’s certainly the implication! The question interests me. The possibility interests me. The evidence and plausibility of questions like that always interest me.

  But just saying “Mhm, those fellows are really good guy Death Guard” (et al) rings a bit… hollow.

  This is a setting where invention is practically considered heresy punishable by execution, and the most reliable ways to contact other planets are to either dream a mangled message into the mind of another psychic dreamer who may not understand what you’re saying – or to fly there yourself in a ship the size of a small city shielded against the very tides of Hell. And even then, you might arrive three years before you set out, two hundred years after, or never at all. People living in that setting just don’t get to have all the answers. Not even the highest of the High Lords of Terra are aware of even a fraction of the truth – and we’re looking through the eyes of people in the setting, seeing what they see.

  The mystery and possibility appeals to me. The craft and realism is in how true several answers could all be. That’s the hard part, and where the depth of the setting lies.

  Now… all of that said? If you didn’t skip right here and you read the book first, then you already know I said plenty about the Emperor. Different characters believe different things about him (Him? It?) and different characters see different things when they look at him. Some of it conflicts between character perspectives, but most of it doesn’t. There’s truth here, as honest and plain as it’s likely to ever come.

  So what did I specifically want to avoid? Really, not all that much. It just comes down to seeing inside the Emperor’s head. We shouldn’t know his thoughts. We can’t understand most of them. It’s not a veil we mere mortals should ever get to pierce. And if we did, it’d likely be something akin to the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. We’d understand what was happening on an intellectual level, but… “My God, it’s full of stars.”

  On a related note, I wanted to preserve the soulless other-ness of the Sisters of Silence, too. I went into The Master of Mankind not wanting to get into their heads at all, but I felt that might do them an injustice to some degree, so as the storyline evolved I kept jumping back to Kaeria’s POV, just for those brief and hopefully satisfying insights.

  It was awesome to be able to write some loyalists in the Horus Heresy for a change – people tend to assume I prefer the red team over the blues but that’s mostly just been a matter of what was free to write about at the time. Getting to delve deep into the psychology of loyalty and the Imperial ideal was a wonderful feeling, with a wealth of new angles to focus upon.

  Loyalty to the Imperium still means something different for almost every person in the setting, but I loved getting to cover the angles of characters as varied as Ra, Arkhan Land, Zephon, Kane, Heironyma, Jaya, and even Skoia. Loyalty and the Imperium itself meant something different vastly to each character, defined as they were by completely different experiences and circumstances.

  And we’ve not seen the last of some of them. The Siege of Terra is coming, and Zephon, Land, and Jaya will be there on the walls standing ready for Horus (along with Howl of the Hearthworld, if you remember those fine and feral gentlemen from the Death and Defiance anthology).

  Probably worth mentioning before
I flee and spare you any more droning is the changing nature of the book’s focus. Before I started writing it, I’d envisioned the main characters being Space Marines. Specifically, I was going to use Zephon (a far, far different version of him) and a few others as the protagonists, but after writing them for a while I ended up scrapping everything I’d done and starting over. It felt false; the War in the Webway really wasn’t about Space Marines – it was largely defined by the very fact Space Marines only showed up at the very end, and those are the angry folks on the red team wanting to slaughter their way into the throne room. A completely different incarnation of Zephon showed up again, and I was much happier with him and his role, especially regarding setting him up for later events and getting to show a sliver of how I view the Blood Angels Legion.

  I think my abiding memory of planning and writing it all comes down to one moment, though. John French and I spent a weekend in my office, painting minis and discussing the storylines for Praetorian of Dorn and The Master of Mankind, trading plot advice and characterisation suggestions. I have a lot to thank him for on this one, not least of which is the insane story map sketched on my chalkboard in his delirious hand. I like to hope (though I don’t dare pretend) that I was as useful to him as he was to me.

  So what’s next? I gather there’s something about a throwdown on the Throneworld? Malice above the Palace?

  I don’t know for sure, but I hope to have a few words to write about that, sometime before the last bell rings.

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  June 2016

  Acknowledgements

  Sincerest thanks to my brother John French, without whom this book would never have been finished. His whip-cracking and continual insight were as invaluable as they always are on every book. I only hope I’m at least half as useful to you, dude.