‘I have,’ said the Warmaster. ‘The binding is flayed skin. But whose?’
‘Corpses. Corpses from Isstvan III. Very decadent,’ Lorgar admitted, ‘but the symbolism in such things is important.’
Horus gave a small shrug, the joints of his armour purring. ‘Times have changed. It takes a great deal to turn my stomach, these days.’ There was a pause, as he searched for the most fitting subject to speak of first. ‘Magnus came to me, much as you do now.’
‘I know. I see his decision in the skeins of fate, even if he still lacks the conviction to make it. In time, he will commit to us.’
‘To us?’ Something cold and black glittered in Horus’s eyes. ‘To me.’
‘Very impressive. Very regal. Is this the voice you’ll use when you take our father’s throne?’
Lorgar smiled in the silence that followed his words. After a half-dozen heartbeats, Horus smiled, as well.
‘What really happened?’ Horus asked. ‘Plasma?’
Lorgar waved a hand over his charred face. ‘Plasma. A Warhound’s plasma blastgun. Twice.’
Horus winced, an awed exhalation escaping his lips. ‘You’re lucky to be merely mutilated.’
Lorgar didn’t reply to that. ‘Why did you call my name, brother?’
‘To see if I could. Nothing more, nothing less. How does your crusade fare in Ultramar?’
‘Just as planned. Guilliman is crippled at Calth. Thirty other worlds already bleed, with our Legions divided and laying siege. Soon, another thirty will suffer the same. We are spreading pain onto the canvas and painting it into a landscape.’
‘What of Calth?’
Lorgar paused again. The confession came without malice, without any emotion at all. ‘Kor Phaeron and Erebus are no doubt celebrating Calth as a triumph.’
‘Then they won?’
Lorgar shrugged. ‘They believe so. They gave birth to the Ruinstorm. It lacks the majesty of the Great Eye, or even the Maelstrom, but it’s a beginning.’
Horus rested a hand on the skinbound book again. ‘Why is it that you sound less than convinced of their triumph?’
‘One has to wonder how triumphant they really were, if their victory parade involves turning tail and fleeing from the Legion they supposedly crushed.’
Horus chuckled, conceding the point. After a short silence, he asked what Lorgar had been waiting for him to ask. The real reason he had summoned his brother.
‘Will this work, Lorgar?’ Horus smiled, but it was a melancholy thing, speaking of a vulnerability always suppressed before other souls. ‘I cannot win this war without you and Angron. I cannot win it without your Legions.’
It was Lorgar’s turn to laugh. ‘Spare me the false humility, Horus. Even if you lost every brother, every Legion, every ship and every soul serving you, you would still throw open the doors of Father’s throne room and expect to win.’
But Horus wasn’t smiling. ‘Will it work?’ he asked again. ‘Can you really drown Ultramar in the warp’s tides, or is the blood of Guilliman’s Legion the most we can hope for?’
Lorgar walked the amphitheatre space of the Vengeful Spirit’s war room, known to the Sons of Horus as Lupercal’s Court. He wasn’t there, not really, yet his footsteps echoed all the same.
‘You forced me to take Angron and the maddened fools he calls his sons. Now you question me, wondering if I will fail. When did you trade your trust in me for this undeserved doubt?’
‘When you changed.’ Horus said it simply. ‘When you fought Corax, and left Isstvan V a different man, claiming to have defied destiny. When you teleported your warriors onto Fulgrim’s ships and threatened his Legion with destruction because he was no longer himself. I traded trust for doubt when I was no longer certain just who you were, Lorgar Aurelian.’
‘I am the Archpriest of the Primordial Truth.’ The Word Bearer’s voice shook, just slightly. ‘I am the Minister of Chaos Absolute.’
‘Those are grand words, Lorgar. They mean little without results.’
Lorgar rounded on his brother. ‘I am who I was born to be. You seek to punish me for no longer being the weakling, the lost one, the primarch with no purpose. Think back to Isstvan III, Horus. I heard that planet die, even thousands of systems away. Surely you spoke with your astropathic choirs, or the fleet’s Navigators. That world’s death-scream was louder, brighter, harsher than even the Astronomican.’
Lorgar lifted a hand, swirling his fingertips, forming an illusory sphere from white flame. It coalesced, forming a ghostly image of Terra. A lance of thin, utterly straight light beamed from the surface of the largest continent.
‘The Blade of Hope. The Emperor’s Blessing. Every Imperial vessel in the galaxy sails by that guiding light. Nothing else pierces the warp’s restless tides. It’s their only star to sail by, and for three beats of a human heart, you, Horus, caused enough pain on one world to eclipse the Emperor’s own psychic beacon.’
He stepped closer to the Warmaster, fire in his eyes. ‘Suffering, Horus. Do you understand? Pain and terror reflected from the material realm into the warp. The agonies of billions upon billions of mortals at the moment of death, poisoning the warp’s song itself. You changed the tune, made the whole melody miss a note.’
He smiled, and while the smile was slow and serene, it still twisted his annihilated face. ‘All pain passes the veil, manifesting as turmoil in the hell behind reality. Your deed sounded as a single drumbeat. I, brother, will compose a whole symphony. Doubt me all you wish. The worlds here are dying to torturous slowness, sending their protracted death-cries across the veil.’
Lorgar made a fist, clenching his teeth. ‘I am re-tuning the warp. Ripening it. I will project Erebus’s Ruinstorm as a flood across the Five Hundred Worlds, pulling space apart by its seams.’
His snarling tirade came to an end and he lowered his gaze. ‘Forgive me my passion, brother. But also trust me, please. I will sever Ultramar from the rest of the Imperium. I will take Guilliman out of the game.’
Horus had a gift for looking magnanimous no matter the moment. ‘You have my trust.’ He leaned on the pulpit, as if the confession cost him. The Warmaster regarded his brother for a long moment. ‘Will you heal? What have your Apoth–’
‘I will heal,’ Lorgar interrupted. ‘Through prayer and meditation, not the awkward fumbling of Legion Apothecaries.’
The Warmaster nodded, though Lorgar saw the doubt his brother sought to conceal. ‘And what of Angron?’
Lorgar raised a brow, scabbed over where his eyebrow had been. ‘I have just realised what’s happening here, brother. Am I one of your lackeys to stand at attention and report?’
Horus’s laughter was unfeigned. ‘Don’t be petulant, Lorgar. We are planning to conquer a galaxy. Intelligence and logistics matter. Tell me of Angron.’
Angron. There was a tale with a twist or two. The Word Bearer’s wracked features blanked into a mask of neutrality. ‘I will speak of Angron when I’m certain just what I can say.’
The Warmaster exhaled slowly, softly, a gesture to signify the erosion of his otherwise infinite patience.
Such theatrics, thought Lorgar.
‘Brother,’ said Horus. ‘If you try to feed me excuses such as “the stars are not right”, I will hunt you down and kill you myself. Then Guilliman’s vengeance won’t be a worry for you at all. Erebus once used that line of reasoning with me. It is fortunate that I was in good humour at the time.’
Lorgar’s eyes, the tawny colour of fox-fur, flickered with what may have been amusement. The stars are not right. That did sound like Erebus.
‘Is something funny, Lorgar?’
‘Many things, but nothing where Angron is concerned. Focus on your own half of the war, Horus. I will act in regard to Angron when I need to act.’
‘Or when he forces your hand.’
Lorgar inclined his
head – concurrence, not submission. ‘Or then.’
‘Is he going to die?’ Horus fixed his gaze on his brother’s. ‘Answer me that at least.’
This time, Lorgar sighed. ‘Yes. Most likely. I will do what I can, but the sickness within him runs deeper and truer than any of us ever knew. His Legion loathes him and emulates him in equal measure. He is getting worse, and they all see it. The implants drilled into his skull will be the death of him, that much is clear. Whatever archeotech was used in their fashioning, it was not made for a primarch’s brain. They cannot be removed. They cannot be countered. But I am not entirely devoid of inspiration.’
Horus sensed that was as much as he was going to get. ‘One last matter, then. What of Signus Prime?’
The Word Bearer was already fading. ‘Signus Prime is your game, Horus. I have greater matters on my mind.’
‘Greater matters?’ Irritation marked the Warmaster’s flawless features again. ‘But Sanguinius…’
‘Sanguinius will stand at Eternity Gate with tears in his eyes and acid in his heart, no matter what you and Erebus hope to accomplish at Signus Prime. Remember that, when your gambit there fails. Remember it when you face the Angel on the final day. Remember that I was the one who told you how it would really end.’
‘What is a “greater matter” than the Angel, at this stage of the game?’
‘Almost everything,’ Lorgar’s voice emerged from the cold air. ‘Ultramar. Fulgrim. Guilliman. Wars we can actually win. There are only two among us who would stand in defiance of the Angel’s wrath, Horus. Only two who would see him slain, once he fights with nothing left to lose. You are one. Angron is the other.’
Truth dawned behind the Warmaster’s eyes. ‘You’ve foreseen it. I hear it in your voice. And that’s why you strive so hard to keep him alive.’
The Word Bearer’s voice softened, fading as his corporeal form had faded.
‘Prophecy is a mistress with many minds, and should never be trusted with all one’s heart. I seek to save Angron because he is my brother, Horus. There was a time when you’d have realised that and thought the same yourself. How soulless you sound now. Watch your thoughts, Warmaster, lest you find yourself hollowed out by your rising ambition.’
‘And you watch your tongue, priest,’ Horus snarled at the empty air.
Halfway across the galaxy, Lorgar opened his eyes, back in a body made of char-blackened meat.
And smiled.
NINE
Awakening
Fury
Titan’s Fall
His first thought was that his targeting array was malfunctioning.
‘My targeting array is malfunctioning,’ he said. Except he said nothing, because nothing came out. Data, in jagged Nagrakali, rained down his red-glassed vision display. He read it, processed it, and because it made sense, he waited patiently.
While he waited, he watched the two humans before him. One of them was Lotara Sarrin. He liked Lotara. The Blood Hand marked her uniform, and it was a fine sight. He’d been there to see Khârn make the mark himself, after all the void-murder Sarrin had committed that fine day.
The other human was robed in red, hooded by an overhanging cowl, and possessed five rotating eye lenses instead of a face. In fairness, it could have been any number of tech-priests, but that didn’t matter, as he liked none of them. He had an eidetic memory, as did all legionaries, so it wasn’t that he forgot the priests’ names. He just never bothered learning them.
He was cold, now that he was awake. A penetrating, heavy-rain kind of cold that sank into the pores and softened the bones. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t like it would kill him. It wasn’t like he could even shiver. No room for that in his coffin.
When he concentrated, shutting out the outside world, he could almost feel himself. The real himself: a naked, hobbled, foetal-curled corpse compacted into an adamantium shell. It might just be his imagination, though. Difficult to say for certain.
His vision shook, making the runes blue for a moment. Sound arrived with a blast, bathing him in the noise of a workshop at war. The crackle-sizzle of sparks and soldering. The rhythmic clang of forge hammers. The binaric burbles of robed half-men.
‘My targeting array is malfunctioning,’ he said. His voice was a mechanical rockslide.
‘It shall be attended to,’ the priest replied. He replied in binaric cant – a keening spill of ones and zeroes, but it was translated into Nagrakali and Low Gothic by the visor display.
‘Captain Sarrin,’ he said. He’d never been gifted at discerning human physical cues. Her eyes were narrowed. Her heartbeat was elevated. Her mouth was set in a thin, firm line that paled her lips. ‘You are either angry or worried.’
‘Both,’ she replied. ‘Lhorke, I need you to defend the ship.’
He hadn’t refused, not that there was any chance he would. Lotara asked him to stand, to walk, to fight, and he would refuse her nothing. Nor would his brothers. All of them hungered to decorate their armour in blood once more. It had been too long – decades, for most of them. Decades when mercy dictated they’d be locked in dreamless sleep, but stasis was a lie of a word.
It was still possible to dream in stasis. Time didn’t always freeze for the mind – only the body. The only thing to be locked into was the crippling mawkishness of one’s own memories.
When he could walk. When he could breathe. When he could feel the kick of a bolter in his fist.
Lhorke shed his bleak musing the moment he pulled clear of his restraint platform. The deck shook beneath his boots. That felt good. The tech-priests backing away before him as he opened his articulated, joint-grinding fists, and dry-fired the combi-bolters in his palms. That felt good, too.
‘Load me,’ he’d commanded them. They’d obeyed. And the truth was, having them obey his orders also felt very fine indeed. They’d loaded him as they’d finished waking his brothers.
His brothers listened to him in death, as they had in life. They were the first, yet he was the First, and while the emphasis was subtle – a single capital letter – the distinction was everything.
They were also the Wounded. The Failures. The ones who endured their handlers whispering binaric code-words such as ‘unstable’ and ‘volatile’ and ‘terminal degradation’.
That’s why they weren’t on the surface. That’s why they were kept in stasis. They were the oldest, the first, before the techniques had been perfected.
Hellesek lacked one arm. His ironform was undergoing repair when he’d been reawakened, and he’d come online with a crushing power fist for a left arm, and the bizarre loss of temporary amputation on the right.
Krydal couldn’t speak. His sarcophagus was bolted into his ironform, still damaged from his last battle, blessed and consecrated by holy oils but installed without his delicate vocabulator circuitry in place. No time for such things.
Neras was worst of all. He woke enraged, lost to the Nails, forever Lost even while he slumbered in stasis. Chains broke beneath his first heaving steps, and his roaring chainblades drowned out the sound of all other industry in the teeming workshop. The wiser tech-priests ran. The more devoted, or more foolish, tried to restrain him with electro-shock bindings – and, in one hilarious instance, a prayer to the Machine-God meant to invoke a sense of calm.
Lhorke had brought his Lost brother back. He achieved it by a volley of combi-bolter fire against the other Dreadnought’s sarcophagus, to gain his attention, and then by beating him into submission with heavy fists. It was no contest at all. As the First, Lhorke was more than a sarcophagus bound to a war-body. His ironform was an avatar of the Machine-God. The Legion had honoured him, resurrecting him as a Contemptor.
Neras was still frantic, still fierce, but he’d come back from the precipice. He could function for now.
Thirteen of them, in all. Thirteen of the XII Legion’s first Dreadnoughts – Lucifer and
Deredeo-patterns, variously abandoned or intentionally forgotten, now standing in unique states of disrepair. They led the defence, as the only World Eaters on board.
World Eaters. Lhorke still felt an intruder to that name. He’d lived and died as a War Hound, in the decades before Angron, before they took the name Eaters of Worlds to honour the primarch’s slain rebel army, the Eaters of Cities. He still displayed the old Legion scratch kill-markings on his ironform, and on his breastplate he bore the armoured wolf’s head, collared by a chain around its throat.
War Hounds. That was his Legion. Not these furious, half-lobotomised madmen who abandoned all notions of honour when they lost themselves to berserker rage.
Even so, they were still his brothers. He couldn’t hate them, but he could blame them. The rot started to creep in when they rediscovered the primarch from that worthless world he called home, and yet, the Legion could still have refused the Nails. They chose to emulate their gene-father, despite all it would clearly cost. They chose to tear open their skulls and let the poison be placed inside.
Angron had ordered it, but was that an excuse? Could the primarch have forced a hundred thousand warriors to bend to his will if they’d refused the mutilation of their minds? Lhorke had fallen in battle thirty years before the primarch’s arrival. He’d been active day and night back then, before the mind’s sluggishness began to take hold. It was difficult to remain awake after a few years. The mind, forced to exert itself to command the ironform, began to suffer the strain of isolation and claustrophobic confinement.
So he’d started submitting to the restful half-sleep of stasis. A few months, at first. Then it became a year for every year he remained awake. He needed more and more rest, to balance the exertion of mastering his ironform.
He’d never felt the kiss of the Nails in his brain pan, though. It was easy enough, given his circumstances: beating them into his corpse’s skull came with significant risk, and he was a relic by any virtue of the word. They wouldn’t risk him in the surgery, so he remained one of the few War Hounds among the rising ranks of the World Eaters.
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