Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  The Horus Heresy

  Dramatis Personae

  Part I - The Northern Cross

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part II - Cathedral of the Mark

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part III - The Red Angel

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About The Author

  Legal

  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

  Primarchs

  Sanguinius, Primarch of the Blood Angels

  Horus Lupercal, Primarch of the Sons of Horus

  The IX Legion ‘Blood Angels’

  Azkaellon, Sanguinary Guard Commander

  Zuriel, Sanguinary Guard Sergeant

  Lohgos, Sanguinary Guard

  Mendrion, Sanguinary Guard

  Halkryn, Sanguinary Guard

  Raldoron, Captain, First Company

  Orexis, Sergeant, First Company

  Mkani Kano, Adjutant, First Company

  Cador, First Company

  Racine, First Company

  Venerable Leonatus, Dreadnought, First Company

  Amit, Captain, Fifth Company

  Furio, Captain, Ninth Company

  Cassiel, Sergeant, Ninth Company

  Meros, Apothecary, Ninth Company

  Sarga, Ninth Company

  Xagan, Ninth Company

  Leyteo, Ninth Company

  Kaide, Techmarine, Ninth Company

  Galan, Captain, 16th Company

  Dar Nakir, Captain, 24th Company

  Madidus, Sergeant, 24th Company

  Gravato, 24th Company

  Novenus, 33rd Company

  Deon, 57th Company

  Cloten, Dreadnought, 88th Company

  Tagas, Captain, 111th Company

  Alotros, 111th Company

  Reznor, Lieutenant-Commander, 164th Company

  Ecanus, 202nd Company

  Salvator, 269th Company

  Dahka Berus, High Warden

  Yason Annellus, Warden

  The VI Legion ‘Space Wolves’

  Helik Redknife, Captain

  Jonor Stiel, Rune Priest

  The Traitor Legions

  Erebus, First Chaplain of the Word Bearers

  Tanus Kreed, Acolyte of the Word Bearers

  Uan Harox, Captain, Eighth Company of the Word Bearers

  Maloghurst, Equerry of the Sons of Horus

  Fabius, Apothecary Majoris of the Emperor’s Children

  Imperial Personae

  Athene DuCade, Shipmistress of the Red Tear

  Corocoro Sahzë, Astropath

  Halerdyce Gerwyn, Remembrancer

  Tillyan Niobe, Gardener

  Unknowns

  Ka’Bandha

  Kyriss

  ‘War is hell.’

  – Wyllam Tekumsah Shirmun, Recovered

  Writings of the Age Before Night [M7]

  ‘If one wishes to go unseen by devils, one should not place their faith in angels.’

  – attributed to the remembrancer Ignace Karkasy [M31]

  The war that came to Melchior was fought by gods and angels; it cracked sky and earth, burned mountains and turned oceans to ash, but in the end it was all about a single objective. On the white salt plains of the Silver Desert, where millions of conscripts and faithful had toiled to build the praise-towers and empath-chapels, the nephilim gathered for the last fight.

  Over the months of the war, they had fallen back, leaving each battleground behind no matter if they had been the victors or the vanquished. It was almost as if the towns, the plainslands and the canyons had been tainted to them by the shedding of blood. The nephilim turned their backs and threaded away, and slowly it became clear where they were heading. From orbit – once their egg-like starcraft had been killed and void superiority lost to them – the lines of displacement were wide enough to be seen with the naked eye. Streams of figures, black ribbons of refugees being herded from each point of the compass, plain against the landscape like the dark plumes of smoke from the burned cities.

  The war of the gods and angels could have been ended from that high vantage point. It would have required only the time and patience needed to drive the enemy into their last stronghold and then bombard it into oblivion.

  But this was not that kind of battle, nor were those who fought it inclined to stand and wait. There were affronts of great scale that needed to be answered in kind, lessons to be learned and demonstrations to be made to the galaxy at large. The nephilim had offended, and they had to be seen to be punished for their crime.

  And then there were the people. Not all of them sang the hymnals, their faces streaked with joyful tears as they looked up at the giants that walked among their number. Not all of them gave everything they had, from chattel to first-born, at the word of the nephilim. Many were among the multitude without choice, shackled and made slaves. They deserved to be freed; to suggest they be sacrificed on the altar of war was unconscionable.

  Some said all the worshippers were slaves, if one were to widen the definition. In the end, the point was moot. To free the people of Melchior, the nephilim had to be exterminated, down to the very last of them. On that point, there was no disagreement.

  In the heart of the Silver Desert, on the sparkling white gypsum wreathed in waves of radiated solar heat, the nephilim gathered with their great entourage among the broken rocks and escarpments, and there they sang their peculiar ululating songs and toiled at the copper frames of their constructions. Waiting for the enemy to come.

  Knights in moon-pale armour
trimmed with black formed a massive phalanx of ceramite, shields and guns. There were eight thousand of them, the marching of their booted feet crunching the top layer of salted soil into powder, which swirled into the air as fine as paper-smoke. White upon white, wreathed in haze, they seemed to float towards the edges of the great nephilim encampment on a rumble of sound, a peal of thunder that had no ending to it. At the edge of their battalions were war machines – battle tanks, hovering skimmers supported by invisible columns of contra-gravity, low and blocky things that resembled armour-plated trilobites, fighting vehicles that bristled with gun barrels. Peering out above the mist there were hundreds of battle standards and pennants; they carried variant designs of the sigil on the shoulders of the warriors, the black face of a sly canine with a crescent moon beneath its snout, along with unit citations and squadron marks.

  The tallest flag, the one that rode at the very tip of the formation, had a unique design – an eye rendered in a manner that resembled sigils of Terra’s antiquity, open and daring, watchful like that of a predator. The pennant was carried by a champion among champions, and he stood resplendent in artificer-wrought armour, marching at the right arm of a demigod. A master of war.

  Horus Lupercal, primarch of the Luna Wolves and lord of the XVI Legion Astartes, halted in his tracks and raised a heavy, gauntleted hand, pointing into the lines of barricades and revetments marking the edge of the nephilim host. A ripple broke back across the ranks of his warriors as they too came to a stop and awaited his commands.

  The hard, severe light of Melchior’s sun cast a fathomless black shadow at his feet. ‘You see them, captain?’ Horus asked softly, without turning to his subordinate.

  Captain Hastur Sejanus, praetor of the Fourth Company of the Luna Wolves, nodded grimly. The near-hit of a nephilim shriekpulse earlier in the campaign had damaged the bones of his skull, and they were knitting together well but the healing process had the side-effect of giving him a constant, low-level headache. The gnawing pain made him irritable and robbed Sejanus of his good humour.

  The giants were on the move, surging forwards from their encampment. The captain of the Fourth heard the whistling, tremulous noise of their sing-song voices as they came, and the cries of the men and women who rushed to get out of their way. Massive footfalls drummed across the taut surface of the desert sands.

  Horus tipped back his head, looking away, up and up, into the near-cloudless sky. For a moment, the commander seemed uninterested in the enemy approach.

  Sejanus glanced around at his lieutenants and made quick gestures in battle-sign, ordering the heavy support and Dreadnought units arranged along the edges of the Luna Wolves formation to make ready. Lascannons, heavy Drako-pattern bolters and magazine-fed missile launchers were prepared. Behind him, the captain heard the sound of eight thousand weapons being armed.

  ‘Here they are,’ he said, compelled to say something as the first of the alien giants rose up and stepped over the inner, human-scaled barriers of their bulwark. The nephilim had a kind of unhurried, careful agility that reminded Sejanus of sea-going creatures seen through the walls of a glass tank. They moved through air as if they were swimming in water, deceptively slow. But he had seen first-hand how fast they could go if they wished, darting and spinning, becoming difficult to hit.

  Sejanus was ready to give the order there and then, but Horus sensed his intent and shook his head. ‘One final chance,’ he said. ‘We’ve come this far. We may still be able to save lives.’

  And before Sejanus could answer, his liege lord was walking forwards, out of the lines of the ranks towards the closest of the colossal xenos.

  It was a grey; Sejanus had absorbed the surveillance data on the aliens via a hypnogogic transfer and he knew what little the intelligence officers of the Imperial Army had gleaned about the command structure of the nephilim. The colours of their bloated, oblate bodies seemed to designate general rank and position. The blue were rank-and-file types, often at the front lines. The green seemed to perform a role similar to that of an Apothecary or perhaps a squad sergeant. The grey were apparently commanders, thought of as ‘captains’ by the analysts for want of a better word. Attempts to translate the screeching native speech of the aliens had proven fruitless; the upper registers of the sounds existed in hypersonic ranges that were beyond even the reach of a Space Marine’s genhanced hearing. That, coupled with the strange light-patterns that flashed over the lines of photophors in their skin, made breaking their tongue a fool’s effort.

  The nephilim had no trouble doing the reverse, however. They had come to Melchior speaking Imperial Gothic as if they had been born to it. And what they said had denied a whole star system to the rule of distant Terra, and the Emperor of Mankind.

  The grey saw Horus and moved towards him, light-flashes on its epidermis sending a silent command to the lines of greens and blues forming up behind it. They halted, and around their thick, pillar-like legs, Sejanus saw humans clustering to the aliens in the same way that children would cling to a mother. The converts were all armed with weapons looted from Melchior’s planetary defence forces. Their faces were faintly visible behind the thick, translucent masks that they wore. The masks blurred their aspects, making their features seem uniform and unfinished; the intelligence corps believed that the conscript masks were made from the epidermal layers of nephilim flesh. Greens had been observed cutting out patches of their own skin for this ritualistic process, and it was theorised that somehow the wearing of the alien flesh bonded the conscripts to their xenos slave-masters. Sejanus had personally observed a post-battle autopsy on a dead nephilim and seen the profusion of wiry innards and gelatinous organs that made up the forms of these things. Hulking entities of roughly humanoid outline, they were smooth like carvings of soapstone, with abstract shapes approximating arms and legs. Their dome heads emerged from their shoulders without a neck, and an array of olfactory slits and eye-spots ringed the surface of their skulls. In this light, the nephilim looked like things of blown glass, their semi-transparent flesh glowing in the bright day.

  Horus halted, the grey bending slightly to look down at him. Each of the xenos stood over twice the height of the tallest legionary.

  ‘I will make the offer one last time,’ Horus told the creature. ‘Release your thralls and leave this place. Do this now, in the Emperor’s name.’

  The nephilim’s photophors glistened and it spread its stubby, three-fingered hands in a gesture of false openness that it must have copied from a human. The air in front of the alien vibrated as an invisible pane of force rippled into being. Strange harmonics whistled and hummed; this was how the xenos spoke, creating an external, ethereal tympanic membrane, manipulating the passage of air molecules through some as-yet-undetermined means. It wasn’t psychic in nature – that had been ascertained already – but technological. Some kind of instrumentality bonded into their organic forms.

  ‘Why do you oppose us?’ it asked. ‘The need does not exist. We want peace.’

  Horus placed one hand on the pommel of the sword at his waist. ‘That is a falsehood. You came here unbidden, and you took a name from the ancient mythology – that of Terra, Caliban and Barac.’

  ‘Nephilim,’ it sang, its voice high and peculiar, sounding out each syllable of the word. ‘The fallen seraphs.’ The grey took a heavy step closer to the primarch, and Sejanus’s hand reflexively tightened around the grip of his storm bolter. ‘Worship them. Praise us. Find peace.’

  ‘Find peace.’ The humans huddling at the feet of the aliens echoed the words as if they were a benediction.

  Horus’s attention never once strayed from the alien. ‘You are parasites,’ he said, his words carrying on the wind across the plains, breaking the silence that followed. ‘We know how you draw your sustenance. You feed on the emanations of life. Our Imperial psykers have seen it. You need to be adored… to be worshipped like gods.’

  ‘That…’ it said, the sound-voice humming, ‘that is a kind of peace.’

&
nbsp; ‘And with your technology you control minds and cage spirit. Human minds. Human spirits.’ Horus shook his head. ‘That cannot stand.’

  ‘You cannot stop us.’ The grey gestured towards the acres of copper towers and strange antennae behind it. There were thousands of the nephilim now, a sea of giants moving forwards in slow, loping steps. ‘We have fought you, we know your way. And you can only win if you kill those you profess to protect.’ It pointed at a group of converts. The alien made the hand-gesture again, trains of white light moving under its skin. ‘Join us. We will show you, you will understand how beautiful it is to be… in communion. To be at once a god and a mortal.’

  For a moment, Sejanus thought he saw something dark pass over Horus’s face; then the instant was gone. ‘We have dethroned all the gods,’ said the primarch, ‘and you are only pale shadows of those false things.’

  The grey let off a hooting cry in its own language and the legion of nephilim advanced, each of them phosphorescing an angry yellow. ‘We will destroy you,’ it said. ‘We outnumber you.’

  Horus gave a rueful nod and drew his sword, a massive blade of oiled steel and adamantium. ‘You will try,’ he said. ‘But today you face the Emperor’s sons and his warriors. We are the Luna Wolves, and this Legion is the anvil upon which you will be broken.’

  From high overhead there was a low crackle and a sound like distant thunder as sonic booms from the upper atmosphere reached the desert floor. Sejanus looked up, his acute eyesight picking out lines of white contrails, hundreds in number, flaring out behind great crimson tears and scarlet-hued hawks as they fell at supersonic speeds towards the silver sands.

  ‘We are the anvil,’ Horus repeated, pointing with his sword. ‘Now behold the hammer.’

  The heavens screamed.

  Ejected from the launch tubes of a dozen capital ships and battle-barges in low orbit, a rain of ceramite capsules tore through the outer atmosphere of Melchior and fell like flaming meteors towards the Silver Desert. Falling with them were diving hawks: Stormbirds and assault gunships turning and wheeling through the air towards the gargantuan nephilim encampment.