by Guy Haley
‘I broke with the Emperor to be free, not to enslave myself to worse masters,’ Perturabo admitted.
Horus chuckled, a leonine growl somewhere at the back of it. ‘The Four hear you. Your arrogance delights them. They respect you. The others…’ He shook his head. ‘They are tools. They are not respected. Not like you, Lord of Iron.’
Horus walked a few steps from the throne to look out at the vivid displays through the viewports.
‘You are too important to waste. Your sons too – they are valuable! Why would I send you down to bleed with the dregs? I have greater things in mind for you.’
‘Mortarion’s sons are on-world,’ Perturabo said peevishly. ‘We are as indomitable, more indomitable, than the Death Guard. They are ill-suited to this battle. I should be there, fighting now.’
Horus dismissed his concerns with a gesture. ‘They have a different role to play to the one I have for you. Mortarion’s sons will die in their multitudes performing their task. I am saving you and your sons, my brother, for the real work.’
Perturabo’s frown broke into a hundred different wrinkles around the input cables embedded in his scalp. ‘When have you ever had a care for the lives of my sons, or for my talents?’
Horus looked at him pityingly. ‘When have I not? You are the best of them, brother! This is a siege. It is the siege, Perturabo. There will never be another battle like this. You are the finest engineer in the galaxy. I protect my best assets. I preserve them for the right moment. You do not toss your advantage away.’
‘Then… then you finally acknowledge my worth?’ said Perturabo stiffly.
‘Finally? I have always acknowledged your worth!’ said Horus. ‘That is why I speak with you alone. The rest of our siblings must be dealt with together, like children, but not you, bold, brave Perturabo. We can talk as men. You and I, we are more alike than the rest. Equals, almost, in the scale of our intellects and the scope of our ambitions.’
Perturabo bristled. He regarded his intelligence as superior to all others’, even Horus’.
‘Of course your Legion will perform better than the Ordo Reductor and Sota-Nul’s lackeys,’ Horus continued, smiling indulgently at Perturabo’s pride. ‘Of course you would already be forcing the walls. Was it not you who uncovered the vulnerabilities of the aegis? Was it not you who proposed the nature of the aerial assault? I rely on you, brother. This is a dangerous time. My attention is… elsewhere. We must be circumspect, not rush in where angels fear to tread.’ His grin became impossibly wide at his use of the ancient aphorism. ‘An egg is a strong vessel for the life it hides…’ He held up his clawed hand. ‘Pressure, pressure, pressure, the egg remains whole, until the pressure is too great, and the egg cracks.’ His claws scissored together with a noise like striking swords. ‘A small breach, a lone assault, these little violations can be overcome by the defender. The Palace must be forced wide on every front at once. So hard and so widespread our attack must be that it cannot possibly be countered.’
Horus’ smile had no humanity to it. It was the sneer of a gargoyle on a pagan fane.
‘You will go to the surface. You will direct your Legion to encircle the walls of the Palace with unbreakable siege lines. Yes, improve the contravallation. Yes, have your Stor Bezahsk show the others how to conduct a barrage. But this is not all I wish you to accomplish. Very soon the Emperor’s grip on the warp around Terra will be prised loose. Mortarion, Angron and Fulgrim will then descend, and the Neverborn allies our patrons promise will be able to manifest soon afterwards. You will–’ Horus broke off suddenly and looked up, hearkening to a call Perturabo couldn’t hear. The Warmaster’s gaze slid along the lines of motionless Word Bearers. He stared into nothingness for a while, then regarded his brother again.
‘So there is nothing for me to do other than dig more ditches while false gods steal my victory?’ said Perturabo.
‘No, my dear brother. All the daemons spawned since time began will not win us victory. Nor will the Legiones Astartes. We require a greater power.’
‘Titans,’ said Perturabo decisively. ‘Landing our Titans without their destruction is the key. Too far from the Palace, they are at risk of counter-attack. Too near, and their landing craft will be targeted and brought down.’
Horus nodded. A pointed tongue slid along teeth that appeared momentarily sharp.
‘You will have your victory, and all the triumphs due you. When you accomplish the task I set you, every creature in the galaxy will know your name, all shall fear you. None shall doubt your brilliance.’
Perturabo listened, rapt.
‘Only you can do this.’ Horus gripped Perturabo’s pauldrons in both hands and stared into his eyes. Heat from the Warmaster’s body warmed his armour. ‘You will find me a way to get Titans past the wall, Perturabo,’ said Horus, ‘and directly into the Imperial Palace.’
Seven plagues
Nightmares return
The enemy speaks
Palace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 15th of Quartus
Katsuhiro was still alive. He did not know how. Sometimes, he thought he had died and been tossed into some punishing afterlife. He was so ill and tired. When the third line was abandoned, Katsuhiro was ashamed to retreat from it, but it had lost all use as a defensive position. Where clean lines of plascrete ramparts had crossed the land, now there were only heaps of splintered rock sculpted into hillocks and dells by endless bombs, all reeking with the corpses trapped in the ruin. Bastion 16 still stood, but now it was in front of Katsuhiro’s position. He felt safer when it was behind him, as if it had his back. Now it was in front he watched it deteriorate, its guns fall silent, its surface pit and crack. Like the slow death of a valued friend, it filled him with despair.
But still Bastion 16 held. Others did not. Their remains lined the battlefield, ugly, rotting teeth in gums brown with decay.
A month limped by. If time could get sick, then it did, leaking putrid fluid from every day. One after another, seven plagues swept over the outworks, ravaging the defenders stationed there. First came the running boils, the trench pox and fungal rot: novel diseases that baffled the medicae sent to treat the troops. Red blindness, foaming madness, a plague of insectoid parasites that ate men from the inside, and finally, the humiliating, agonising death of the Bloody Flux. Jainan died. So many people died. The few people Katsuhiro knew were gone, save Doromek, who never sickened, and the woman Myz. He stopped talking to other people, saving his words for tearful monologues to himself that he mumbled into holes in the ground.
The enemy kept coming. Often the attackers were the undisciplined rabble they had faced before, but increasingly the merciless, nigh-on unkillable legionaries of the Death Guard came against them. The sole time the loyal Space Marines had come out faded from memory. When the Death Guard were driven back it was by dint of the wall guns, meaningless, short-lived triumphs that came at a terrible cost to the human defenders of the outworks.
The aegis continued to weaken, allowing more of the enemy’s ordnance to fall through. Artillery emplacements in the fortifications encircling the Palace pounded them incessantly. Poisons and disease fell as often as fire. Toxic environment gear became the defenders’ skin, gas masks took the place of faces.
Katsuhiro’s company was merged three times with others, until they were a mongrel formation, stripped of the thin pretence they had of being members of the Kushtun Naganda. They were as motley and filthy as the wretches that attacked them. Only the direction they were facing told who was on which side, and that was not enough. Men from both forces broke in the middle of battles, going berserk and attacking anyone around them. Mistakes were common.
The nightmares that assaulted Terra in the months before the invasion, gone from Katsuhiro when he reached the Palace, crept back into his few hours of sleep. Horrible things, full of mutilations and blood, they were far more real and disturbing than even the traumas of war.
One rest period – it might have been the night or the day, the
clouds of ash and fire long having removed differentiation from the two – Katsuhiro dreamed such a dream, of endless tunnels of black glass curved like a beast’s intestines that he ran through in a panic, something clawed and silent gaining on him. He fell from the tunnel without warning into a sea of violent colours, where toothed hallucinations took on solidity for the sole purpose of tearing him apart, then tumbled through a door made of eyes onto the ruin of the Katabatic Plains. A bloody rain poured, and then, from the sky, a giant fell, huge and monstrous. Roaring in pain and rage, it came for him, a clawed hand reaching down to snuff out his life.
Katsuhiro woke screaming. No one came to his aid. Everyone had their own daemons to wrestle with. When he calmed himself from shrieks to moans and then to sobs, he feared for a moment he might be deaf. He heard nothing but his own, sickly breath rattling in the hood of his gas mask.
He stood on feeble legs. Hundreds of other soldiers were doing the same, looking across the grey wasteland of the Katabatic Plains in fear.
The bombardment had stopped. The heat of the constant explosions, which rose on occasion to heights painful to bear, was carried off by the spring winds and the temperature dropped rapidly. Poison gas and clouds of viral spores blew away. Katsuhiro felt the breeze’s caress through the rubber of his tox-suit. The wind called to him.
For the first time in what seemed forever, he tore off the hood of his gas mask, not caring if he died, and stood gasping like a landed fish. He closed his eyes to enjoy the simple bliss of sweat drying on his skin.
Thunder boomed, then roared again – no bomb this time but a shout, a voice, a presence so large it filled the heavens from horizon to horizon.
The sky flashed, and all on the defences looked upwards, and there beheld a terrifying vision.
The Crimson Apostle
An offer of surrender
Blood rain
Daylight Wall, Helios Gate, 15th of Quartus
There were six hundred merlons on the parapets of each tower of the Helios Gate, huge tombstone blocks four metres deep, three wide and three high. Each one had its own firing step. Each firing step hosted a figure in blood-red armour. They faced out in every direction, silent sentinels, waiting for the petty battles of air and outworks to be done and the first true hammer blow to fall. They were men of the First Chapter of the Blood Angels, its men and their captains under Raldoron’s command.
Another commander might have remained inside the tower command centre, but Raldoron still preferred to walk the walls. He paced around the circumference of the tower. The space between the central gun turret and the battlement was wide, but then everything about the gate was scaled for gods and not for men. The macro cannon fired every ten seconds, hurling its destructive payloads no longer upwards at the fleet, but across the plain towards the contravallation. The barrel was at its lowest elevation, close enough for Raldoron to reach up and touch as he passed underneath it. When it fired, the gate convulsed upon its foundations. Even to him, a veteran of a hundred wars, the effect was alarming, but he put his faith in the primarchs, and trusted that Lord Dorn had allowed for these violent forces when he designed the defences.
Raldoron’s auto-senses failed to shut out the gun’s roar. Dampened, the discharge still made his ears ring. He relished the sensation. While his orders prevented him from attacking, the gun was proof that the Imperium was fighting back.
Raldoron’s vox pulsed. Thane’s notifier rune blinked in the upper right of his helm-plate.
‘On the walls again, First Captain?’
Raldoron paused in his patrol. He looked out between the mighty teeth of the crenellations over the blasted plain. War remade worlds so quickly.
‘I could hide inside,’ said Raldoron. ‘It is safer. A few of my officers have intimated as much to me, but I will not listen to them. I am a Blood Angel. I am no logistician. My place is in battle, with sword in hand and bolter kicking in my fist.’
‘I prefer battle myself,’ voxed Thane, as he approached around the turret’s giant turntable. ‘If you would have me, I would accompany you.’
‘You are welcome,’ said Raldoron. He looked out over the tangle of wrecks. ‘I feel that something is about to happen.’ They spoke over the vox, insulated to an extent from the roaring of the wall guns, though no conversation could survive the macro cannon’s report.
‘Your lord is well known for his second sight,’ said Thane. ‘Do you share it?’
‘In truth, I am not sure,’ said Raldoron. ‘I anticipate things, but I have always attributed that to my augmentations and training. I would not wish for Sanguinius’ foresight. It is a curse as much as a gift.’
‘It appears you perhaps do have a little of his power,’ said Thane pointing. ‘The bombardment has ceased!’
They looked upwards. A last shower of shells screamed down. Lightning flickered through the churning clouds, purple, yellow and green. The heavens writhed with dying winds.
‘Fresh devilry,’ said Thane.
‘It is beginning,’ said Raldoron tersely. ‘Maintain bombardment of enemy positions,’ he voxed to the gunnery command centres. ‘All companies stand ready for assault.’
Thane looked at him. ‘How will they come against us?’
‘That, I do not know,’ said Raldoron. ‘But it is time. That I know in the pit of my being.’
The skies rippled like water, and in the clouds a face appeared, flat as a pict from a plastek flimsy projected onto an inadequate screen. It wavered with the movement of the clouds, unfocused at first, then became sharp as a knife to the skin.
At first, they took it for a sort of daemon. The face was horned. Its short muzzle ended in a maw surrounded by lamprey teeth. Six eyes glowed above it. But then, like the effect of a trick picture, the face changed in Raldoron’s perception, and he saw he was looking at the distorted war-mask of one of the Legions.
‘Word Bearers,’ Raldoron said.
‘Sorcery,’ said Thane. ‘They have fallen far.’
‘Hearken to me, oh people of Terra!’ the being said, its harsh voice penetrating the racket of the guns.
‘Perhaps they have come to offer their surrender,’ said Thane drily.
The Palace guns continued to fire.
‘There’s my father’s answer to that,’ he added.
‘Predictable,’ the Word Bearer said. ‘But it is not primarch or Space Marine I address, but you, the common people, the subjects of Lord Horus who languish under the tyranny of the False Emperor.’ The guns boomed on, but every word was clear, bypassing ears and auditory systems to ring in the minds of everyone on the planet.
The head turned, sweeping across the world. With that glance the legionary took in continents, and he laughed at what he saw with a low, monster’s growl.
‘Heed my offer!’ the Space Marine said. ‘I am Zardu Layak, the Crimson Apostle. I am the herald of the Warmaster Horus, rightful lord of mankind. I call on you all, people of the nations of Terra, to hearken to me and hearken well. There comes a choice now, twixt life and death.’
The voice boomed away across the valleys of the truncated mountains and tore around the globe. The Apostle waited for his words to be digested before he continued. Some of the warriors on the defences shouted up at the vision in defiance. Others screamed.
‘I come with an offer to you all. Lay down your arms. Renounce your False Emperor. Raise your voices to the Warmaster and plead for your lives, and you will be spared.’ Another pause. Where the maw of the Space Marine’s mask projected onto the clouds, a vortex spun, and down it floated an island. That was how Raldoron instinctively named it. It was not a craft. It was not a platform or an orbital plate, but an island made of bone. Even from so far away, the ivory glint of it and the rough, compacted surface of the thing made it clear that it was formed of thousands of skeletons, crushed together.
The island ceased descending when it was level with the walls. It came down close by the Helios Gate, and began a circuit of the defences, passing in front of
Raldoron and Thane’s position. Guns tracked the island, las-beams, plasma and shells hammering at it, but they did no harm. The island rippled, the shots passing through.
‘A vision. An illusion,’ said Thane.
‘Maybe, but this Layak is there,’ said Raldoron. ‘Look. He shows himself to us.’
He pointed. Upon the top of the island was a pulpit formed of a monster’s skull. From the empty brainpan, Layak delivered his sermon. Around the pulpit eight thousand mortal priests in purple robes swayed from side to side in worshipful silence.
‘The Emperor is a liar,’ said Layak. ‘You have all been deceived. He has lived among you for thousands of years, biding His time, using your ancestors as He uses you now. The Emperor speaks of Unity. The Emperor speaks of the protection of the species. The Emperor speaks of the furtherance of mankind. The Emperor speaks of many things, and all He says is lies. Know this, people of Terra, He is false! The Warmaster, great Horus, has seen through His deceit, and commands me to relay to you the truth of the Emperor’s ambition.’
The island rotated as it floated by. The wall guns continued to shoot at it, but it was a mirage called with magic, and it passed by unharmed. Seemingly serene, it nevertheless moved at pace, and was soon shrinking out of sight down the sweep of the Daylight Wall. Raldoron ordered surveillance automata to track it, giving him a doubled view. Via his auto-senses he looked down on the traitor. From the wall he looked up to the sorcerously projected image.
‘The Emperor is a parasite! He uses your sacrifices to raise Himself up in the warp. Your blood and your souls are His meat and drink. He wages a campaign to challenge the Pantheon of true deities. Listen to me, misguided, abused children of Terra. Let it be known to you that the Emperor desires only apotheosis. He would become a god and supplant the Gods of War, Life, Pleasure and Knowledge. He would transcend this plane of existence, and abandon you all to the monsters He pledged to rid you from. It is He who is the traitor to the species, not Horus! Horus will save you. Look to the sky and see his fleets. Witness how many others have seen reality for what it is, unclouded by lies and wishful thinking. Know that the coming of Horus is the coming of truth! He is the chosen of the gods, the powers in the warp who have watched over humanity for time immemorial until, to their dismay, the Emperor barred them from their worshippers. He has seen the gods’ glory and serves them willingly. He does not wish to supplant them. He does not spoon-feed you pleasant fantasies. He is not a lying tyrant – he, Horus Lupercal, is the saviour of mankind!’