Grey Angel
Page 1
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
TALLARN: IRONCLAD
THE HONOURED
THE UNBURDENED
PROMETHEAN SUN
AURELIAN
BROTHERHOOD OF THE STORM
CORAX: SOULFORGE
SCORCHED EARTH
TALLARN: EXECUTIONER
THE CRIMSON FIST
PRINCE OF CROWS
THE PURGE
RAVENLORD
CYBERNETICA
WOLF KING
GARRO: VOW OF FAITH
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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.
The prisoner looked up as the cell door opened. Chains as thick as a man’s wrist held him against the bare stone wall, looping over him like rust-scaled serpents. They had deactivated his power armour, its dead bulk holding his body like a manacle.
The small cell was carved from black rock, and the walls glistened with damp as a figure stepped through the door carrying a torch. The flame caught the prisoner’s eyes, kindling sparks in their depths as they watched the torchbearer.
Shadow-grey robes swathed him, and the prisoner could see a hint of a smiling mouth hidden within a cowl. The iron door shut and locked behind the figure. The cell was suddenly silent but for the hissing of the torch.
‘So you are the one they caught,’ the figure said at length. ‘I am here to question you. You understand this much, I am sure.’
‘Do what you must. I do not fear your methods.’
‘I am here to find answers, not cut you to pieces.’
As the figure stepped forwards the prisoner saw two liquid-black eyes glitter within the cowl. The figure was a head shorter than a Space Marine, though bulked by armour and robe.
The prisoner blinked. His vision was sharp, but it was as if his mind could not focus, as if something about the figure could not be resolved. The figure glanced into the shadowed corner of the cell as though he were waiting for something. ‘What line of simple questioning requires that you chain me here?’
‘Questions of loyalty.’ The robed figure held the torch closer, letting its flickering light reach across the dull grey surface of the prisoner’s armour. ‘You wear the battleplate of the Legions, but bear no heraldry or marks of fealty. To whom we bend our knee defines who we are. This is the order of things. You are undefined, your loyalty unknown, and you have strayed into my realm. At best you are a mystery. At worst…’
‘Is this an interrogation or a sermon?’ the prisoner demanded.
‘Does it have to be either? An interrogation would imply that we are enemies, and I would not want to believe that. A sermon would mean that I was trying to persuade you, and I have no need to do that. I am simply telling you what I know to be true.’
‘These chains say otherwise.’
‘Once, upon this world, it was death to come unheralded into another’s domain. Be thankful that I have allowed you to keep your armour.’ The robed figure placed the torch in a metal bracket, his armoured hands glossy black and fire-touched gold. The oily light pushed back the gloom at the edge of the cell and the prisoner could see his bolter and chainsword propped against the wall. ‘The chains are simply a precaution. I have accorded you every honour, though you have not extended the meanest courtesy in return. You have not even told me your name.’
The prisoner leaned his head back, feeling the cool damp of the stone wall upon his scalp. ‘My name is Cerberus.’
‘Ah, a legend of the ancient times. As you choose. I will return the honour. My name is Luther, and I would know why you have come to my realm.’
Iacton Qruze folded into the shadow beyond the wall and listened. His armour was ghost-grey against the night, and the only mark it bore was lost in the gloom and rain spatter. He had removed his helmet, letting his senses sift the night air. He could smell the gathering charge of thunder.
Above him the fortress of Aldurukh rose in tiers of cold stone to a starless night sky. He had penetrated its outer defences, but he knew that there were guards, sensors and security precautions that would only increase the deeper he went. He was taking a risk, but time and the possibility of total failure had forced his hand.
Necessity: his watchword for all these last years, as bitter and undeniable as ever. He had been on Caliban for days, moving in the darkness – listening, watching, trying to find what they needed, what they had come for.
The Lion had sent part of the Dark Angels Legion back to its home world under the command of Luther. That had been long before Horus had begun his rebellion, but Caliban had been eerily silent
ever since. In a war of betrayal and treachery, that silence could mean nothing, or many things. It was a matter they had come here to resolve, but they were running out of time.
The Dark Angels had captured Loken. No, he thought, Loken had allowed them to take him. Qruze could see only folly in such an action – it was a dangerous gamble. He had waited for as long as he could, to see if Loken would get himself free, or if his plan had actually worked. If Loken had met with Luther and determined his loyalty, then they could deliver their message and move into the open. But there had been no sign, and too much time had passed. Now Qruze had to gamble even more.
Nothing was moving in the courtyard below – he could hear only the wind and the patter of rain on stone. He shifted forwards, his armoured bulk moving with a quietened purr. The battleplate was that worn by all of the Legiones Astartes, but a keen eye would have picked out the differences, the mark of unique artifice in its grey simplicity.
Qruze moved to the parapet edge, staying low. He cocked his head, feeling the rain run down the valleys of his scarred cheeks.
The lightning lit the sky and roared its anger over the fortress. Qruze dropped over the parapet, the sound of his impact on the stone below swallowed by the thunder’s echo. He glanced around, his hand on the boltgun mag-locked to his leg plate.
Nothing.
He moved around the edge of a courtyard, keeping to the rain-soaked shadows. The oily light of a torch flickered from an open archway that led into the fortress’ interior. He was three paces from the door when he heard the footsteps. He went still, hand hovering over his bolter.
A figure emerged from the doorway, the torchlight rendering it as a writhing silhouette. Qruze could see the bulk of pauldrons swathed under a fur-trimmed robe that rippled in the wind. Short wings sprang from the temples of the warrior’s blunt-faced helm, and a drawn sword rested against his right shoulder. Rain ran down the flat of the blade. In the torchlight it looked like runnels of cooling fire.
Qruze held his breath, felt the rising beat of his hearts. The Dark Angel tilted his head, red eye-lenses fixed upon the sky.
Lightning bleached out the courtyard and the robed Dark Angel. Qruze could feel the rising crest of adrenaline, cold and oily, inside his old muscles. He forced his heartbeats to slow. Inside his gauntlets his fingers were almost trembling.
The Dark Angel dropped his gaze, half turned and scanned the courtyard opposite where Qruze stood. He would have to shoot if the Dark Angel turned around. It would have to be a kill-shot, clean and fast, very precise – a single Stalker round in the instant the sentry drew his bolter.
Qruze’s mind ran through the movement, focusing on the target, the timing, readying himself for the inevitable moment.
He could see the rain beading on the pale fur draped across the Dark Angel’s shoulders. Qruze had not come here to kill, but he would do so if needed. That it was a fellow Space Marine, whose loyalty might yet be true, did not alter that necessity. In the war they now fought, such things meant nothing.
He visualised the mercury-filled shell punching through the warrior’s eyepiece. He tensed his legs – he would need to spring forwards as soon as he fired, to catch the body before it clattered to the floor…
The Dark Angel turned, and walked back through the doorway. Qruze listened to the footsteps recede. He exhaled slowly, and let his muscles relax.
He saw the glint of the blade just an instant before the power field was activated. The static edge of the tip brushed his temple, and went still.
‘Do not move.’
The electric wasp buzz of the blade filled Qruze’s ear. He could half see someone at his left shoulder, sharp features and a grim mouth framed by the shadow of a deep hood. He had been discovered, and that meant that all aspects of the mission were compromised.
Truth and loyalty now meant nothing. He would have to kill, but given the skill implied by how completely his enemy had surprised him, that would be no easy task. Qruze swallowed. He needed to wait for the powerblade to move.
‘You may speak,’ the blade-wielder went on, ‘but if you move in any other way you will die.’
‘I understand.’
‘Good. Now tell me why you are here, Iacton Qruze.’
‘They are not coming for you,’ Luther assured him.
Loken was silent. He had come here to find an answer to a simple question: where did the Dark Angels of Caliban stand? For the Emperor, or with Horus? Rogal Dorn himself had demanded the answer and, with his brother Iacton Qruze, Loken had come to find it.
But the answer was not simple. His near-death on the murdered planet of Isstvan III had given him a hunter’s instinct for the vile scent of the warp’s corrupting influence, but in facing Luther he could feel the shift of immaterial energies. The coiling touch of temptation.
He was no psyker, but at that moment he felt that somehow he perceived something beyond mortal senses, as if scent and sight stretched into another realm altogether.
Luther’s eyes were fixed upon him, unblinking. Loken shook his head, and gazed into the shadows in the corner of the cell. The sensation was insubstantial, but Loken could feel it in every word Luther uttered, tasting the secrecy and the shadows of choices already long made. He could feel it in the fact of his own captivity in the dungeons of the Dark Angels.
‘I am here alone.’
Luther smiled as if at a subtle joke. He stepped closer, slipped the cowl from his head. His face was strong but without the blunt brutality of most Space Marines – he was human still, at least in part. There was an openness to his features, an air of supreme confidence bound to intellect. It was the face of trust and brotherhood, the face of someone you could believe in and follow to the last.
Loken had heard of Luther’s quality as a leader. He had seen something of it long ago, but as he looked back at the Dark Angel he realised that the reputation missed the essence of the man. He was a fulcrum around which conquests and loyalties turned. Such power had unified Terra and created the Imperium, and then that same power had turned it upon its head.
Looking into Luther’s dark eyes, Loken realised that he had known such a quality before. For an eye-blink instant he felt he was looking at Horus himself – Horus from a more noble time.
Luther turned away, and walked to a low block of mould-covered stone at the foot of the wall. He sat, his eyes gazing into some imagined distance. Loken watched him, though in his head he flicked between strategies. Questions and possibilities.
He had taken a risk in letting himself be taken. He might have been killed out of hand, but it had been the only way for this meeting, this test to take place. Now Loken had to make a choice that he had not anticipated.
‘Do you dream, Cerberus?’ Luther asked, his voice tinged with melancholy.
‘I dream.’
‘Of what?’
‘I dream… of my brothers.’
‘Who are they? The brothers in your dreams, who are they?’
Loken gritted his teeth. ‘The dead.’
‘Ah. I cannot dream. Ever since the Imperium changed me I have not dreamed. I can remember it, though. What it was like, and so forth.’ Luther nodded and Loken felt a jolt of surprise; there was understanding in Luther’s eyes, understanding and pity. ‘This is not the first time you have been left to fate. I can see it in your manner.’
Loken felt as though Luther’s words had peeled back a scab formed over the past, as if the torment he had suffered were merely a specimen pinned out under Luther’s calm gaze.
He remembered the sky falling and him falling with it. He remembered the face of Tarik, grinning for the last time, and the wind of Isstvan carrying the stink of a murdered brotherhood.
Horus had betrayed him, had tried to kill him and then left him on a dead world.
‘It takes something from you doesn’t it?’ Luther murmured. ‘Being deserted hollows y
ou out, and leaves a void inside. People might say that it hurts, that the psyche aches from the wound.’
Loken tried to bring his attention back to the present, but could not. They had left him, to the ashes and the tainted ruins! They had left him amongst the dead, amongst the cursed dwellers of the netherworld! He had only been called back to fight in a war of revenge and broken futures…
Luther went on. ‘It’s not true though. Abandonment does not leave pain. You wish it did because that would be better than the truth. It leaves nothing. Not hope, not pain, not forgiveness.’
Loken was silent. He could feel his muscles bunched inside his armour, his skin prickled with sweat as his hearts surged stimulant-laden blood through him. He let out a breath and stilled his body to calm. Luther watched him closely.
After a long pause, he frowned and stood. He pulled the torch from the iron bracket and came to stand so that he was no more than an arm’s reach away. He raised the torch, and the heat prickled Loken’s bare features. ‘There is something about your face… I am sure we have met before.’
Luther tilted his head and took a step back.
‘On Cardensine perhaps? Now that was a battle. The warriors of seven Legions in the field, enemies so thick they mashed the dead to pulp under their feet. Or Zaramund? Yes, perhaps it was there. We fought alongside the Luna Wolves there. Brave warriors, swift as a lance strike, and as hard as the rock of Cthonia. Yes, perhaps it was there.’
Loken looked back at Luther, his face revealing nothing. Inside him, memories spun – Cardensine, the Lion raising his sword to the sky as battle-fire burned its night away. Zaramund, where Loken had stood among the ranks and watched Luther follow Abaddon over the cratered redoubts. It had been no more than a few decades ago.
He felt cold. He should not have come to Caliban. Luther was not a man to be judged at a glance – he was something more important, more pivotal to the course of the war than even Lord Dorn had dared to imagine.
‘Do you remember the fields of Zaramund?’ Luther asked him, pointedly.
‘I remember nothing,’ Loken snapped.
‘There is a brush of Cthonian in your words, “Cerberus”, few though they have been.’