by Guy Haley
Now the questions really begin. Who to choose to tell our story? How do we avoid having a novel that is two months of bombing and talking? Where did the reinforcements come from? How do they get through without being blown up? Questions demand answers, and answers fill novels.
In another, later meeting, we decided it might be an idea to set the scene for the readers. The Horus Heresy is popular, but not everybody has read everything, and we anticipated people might well jump into the story here. Hence another question to add to this first crop: how do we bring people up to speed without falling into a trap of endless exposition?
Through human eyes
I decided early on that we should show at least part of the conflict through human eyes, an idea that tied in neatly with the arrival of our Imperial Army reinforcements. They had to come from elsewhere on Terra. They could not arrive after the bombardment commenced because they’d all die, so it seemed the reinforcements in question would likely be among the very last personnel sent to the Palace. I decided to make them conscripts. Thus Katsuhiro was created to be one of our main points of view. I also wanted to do something with John French’s Alpha Legion operatives from Praetorian of Dorn, simply because they were such great characters.
Other questions were then posed. Where would they fight? How can we get some action into the story early on? How is a siege such as this prosecuted and how is it defended against?
Castles and cities of old often had subsidiary outworks around the walls. Now so has the Palace. Katsuhiro and his comrades would fight on the outworks to blunt the initial attacks. We know for a fact that Horus doesn’t commit his legionaries until two months after his initial attack. I reasoned both sides wanted to reserve their Space Marines, who, though numbering in the hundreds of thousands, are not infinite. Initially, the action had to be between the millions of lower quality troops each side commands.
By this point, the novel’s structure was beginning to come together.
The power of Eight
This is a war of magic. The Horus Heresy wears the clothes of science fiction, but it has a fantasy heart. Horus’ strategy is as much dictated by esoteric factors as it is by mundane considerations. Two further questions about the early siege helped uncover what these factors were: where were the daemons and why didn’t the Traitor primarchs set down on Terra from the outset? Could the reasons for these two things be related? Maybe, we group-thought in our meetings, the Emperor was keeping out the Neverborn by force of will, and in doing so preventing His daemonically corrupted sons landing. Hence eight principal avenues of attack, arranged symbolically in a wheel of Chaos around the Palace. Now I had two strategic goals for Horus to achieve: break the Emperor’s psychic wards around Terra, and bring down the aegis to allow his troops to land inside the Palace itself.
A suggestion that I cover all eight places of attack intrigued me, but I decided against it. Space in the book dictated that I concentrate on one specific area of the Palace walls. We now move beyond purely asking questions and start to look at the logistics of storytelling. How much time one has, how much space and, crucially, how to deliver a satisfactory narrative that encompasses all the avowed aims of the book.
How and why
Why don’t they nuke the site from orbit? is usually the very first question I ask myself when writing a Warhammer 40,000 novel. Horus needs to face the Emperor. He can’t simply blow Terra up – we know that because he didn’t, and by asking more questions we decided why. That will be answered later in the Siege.
How one would lay siege to such a fortress as the Imperial Palace provided the next question to help shape this book. The Palace aegis must be potent to nullify bombardment by the biggest fleet in history. Whatever protected the Palace would probably employ advanced technology. If so, how could it be overcome? More questions.
‘Be patient, brother,’ said Perturabo. ‘You will have your escalade. The shields cannot be broken. They cannot be starved of power. But they can be weakened.’
An orbital vid-capture of a section of the Palace defences sprang up. The walls cut across the landscape neat as a draughtsman’s marks. The Palace-city’s giant buildings were models behind. The flattened coins of explosions displaced by void shielding blinked all over the defences, not touching the ground beneath.
‘This sequence depicts a rare failure. Within the bombardment pattern I concealed several distinct targeting cycles to test various aspects of the aegis: modulation, raising speed, power absorption and displacement, displacement response time, displacement triggering velocity and others.’
‘I provided all this information!’ protested Kelbor-Hal.
‘Consolidated datasets fall into false, idealistic patterns. Direct, practical experimentation is the only way I can be sure.’
Finding a name
Horus’ initial landings to attack the outworks is a cynical exercise in judging strength. It inspired me to include human perspectives on the traitor side as well, including that of a beastman in a deliberate call back to the old Epic game. Through these wretches the title of the book, elusive before, finally presented itself. The Lost and the Damned fit well. It is the name of the first of two seminal books on Chaos published in the late 1980s. The second, Slaves to Darkness, has already been used in the Heresy series. The Lost and the Damned are Horus’ lowly cannon fodder, but everyone else in the Siege is lost or damned in some way too.
The attack on the aegis seemed a good place for the ‘Battle of Britain’ element. In a slight change to the timeline, this couldn’t be in orbit, because Horus must already have taken Terra’s high anchors in order to begin the bombing. We can assume such a battle took place before this book commenced. I imagine, given the size of the Warmaster’s fleet, it was over very quickly.
Depicting the air war gave the combat scenes some variety and allowed us another human character to experience the war through.
Transhumans and post-humans
As you refine your story, the questions become smaller, the answers giving finer detail. How were the defence lines laid out? What did Ashul and Myzmadra hope to achieve there? What weaknesses could be exploited?
However, a story of this nature is not formed entirely by questions and answers. It is directive-led, from the publisher in their outline, and the author at every level in fulfilling the commission. I decided to look through human eyes, but this is a war of Space Marines. Telling the whole thing from the point of view of terrified algae farmers and bureaucrats wouldn’t have hit that target at all.
For my primary transhumans I chose Abaddon of the Sons of Horus, Raldoron of the Blood Angels, Gendor Skraivok of the Night Lords and Khârn of the World Eaters.
Raldoron I’ve always liked. Only three of the loyal Legions are present in the Palace in any great numbers. Sanguinius’ story arc suggested I choose them. Abaddon is our eyes and ears within the traitor fleet. His story arc is perhaps the most important of all in the long term, and it was decided in our meetings we needed to follow his tale.
‘I will be first upon Terra!’ roared Angron. ‘You are not worthy! It is my honour! Khorne demands it! The Blood God decrees it! You shall burn in lakes of fire for your temerity!’
Skraivok and Khârn’s inclusion were less consciously decided. They came about because of another question, one about the primarchs. The primarchs are the mythic element, the gods of our grand tragedy. Each one generated numerous questions, each answer gave more grist to the mill, but this one was particularly important:
What, while Horus is waiting in orbit, would Angron do?
He’s not going to sit about now, is he?
On primarchs
Angron’s god and his temper demand he have the honour of landing on Terra first, but his general and his father deny him. Therefore, Angron needed to be contained until he could be unleashed. We saw him unchained on the hull of the Conqueror in The Solar War, so we know he is no longer locked up. He’d not likely go back into his prison; besides, by this time he is too powe
rful to restrain.
Lucoryphus was on the walls. After all this time, he was on the Palace walls. Their attack had taken the defenders by surprise. There were no other of the Warmaster’s forces on the battlement, only the blue and red of Night Lords battleplate was visible, both colours close to black in the fire and murk. He looked up at the spires of the Imperial Palace, bathed in light and glorious despite their embattled state.
Lucoryphus’ hearts pounded with the scale of his achievement.
He raised his arms and shouted at the sky. ‘Mino premiesh a minos murantiath!’ he cried in Nostraman, the words as liquid as the rain. ‘We are first on the wall!’
Skraivok presented himself as an answer. I’ve always liked him. I created him as an opposite to Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s sober, heroic Night Lords. He’s at the other end of the scale, deliberately over the top, a villain who relishes his role as a villain. He deserved his comeuppance. Including Skraivok allowed me to delay Angron, conclude Skraivok’s story to my own satisfaction, and answer a question that arose from Aaron’s Night Lords trilogy that needed answering here: Did Lucoryphus of the Bleeding Eye really get to the wall top first?
‘My lord, I suppose my telling you to get off the wall will do no good,’ said Raldoron. ‘But I am honour bound to say you should. We cannot lose you.’
Sanguinius laughed, a musical, pure sound in the blood rain and the slaughter. ‘You are right, my son. I would not leave you if I were sure it would be my end,’ he said. Then he spoke the awful words Raldoron had heard so much of late. ‘And I know I do not die today.’
The other primarchs all have their paths to tread. Perturabo has realised the power of the warp and seeks to master it like he has everything else. Sanguinius heads bravely to his fate. As he nears the end his powers of foresight are increasing. I enjoy the ironic mirror he is to Konrad Curze. Curze is in despair knowing his own death, believing it cannot be avoided. Sanguinius knows he can change his fate, but if he does it will be to the detriment of the galaxy, but until that moment, he will not die. He will be a willing, almost messianic sacrifice.
‘…war is a calculation, this one more than all the others. Life cannot be measured in absolute terms any longer. Every death must be set against one consequence alone – how much time it can buy us. Time is the currency of this battle. We must hoard seconds like misers. Lives we have in abundance. They can and must be spent freely, regrettable as that is.’
Dorn is becoming increasingly ruthless. The Siege is a mathematical exercise with time and life as its variables. Circumstances are forcing him to become more like Perturabo. The others all have their stories too.
Every story needs a climax
The first breach of the wall and major incursion into the Palace does not occur until later in the Siege. But the book needed a climax. In real-life sieges, multiple attempts are made to break into a fortification, often of differing types, so we finish the story with the first major attack on the Palace proper by the World Eaters and the Death Guard, who were mentioned in the last part of our timeline as being the first Traitor Legions down.
On the horizon, screeching horns blew.
Physical movement pushed through the line of shimmering energy fields guarding the contravallation. Constructs so large they were visible from the wall top across scores of kilometres of broken land emerged from the battlesmoke. Three huge siege towers pushed their way through the landing craft wrecks, taller even than the broken ships, and big enough to grind the smaller of them flat.
Siege warfare has always fascinated me. Including an attack by siege towers hit so many buttons narratively, and allowed, in the sheer size and infeasibility of a siege tower that is hundreds of metres tall, that touch of grand fantastical insanity that is the hallmark of Warhammer.
The climax brought so many narrative threads together: Perturabo’s triumph over the aegis, Skraivok’s ultimate fate, Lucoryphus’ truth, Angron’s arrival in a rain of blood…
Most of these subplots and incidents arose as I worked. Only Angron’s plummet was intended from the outset. Writing a novel is by no means a planned exercise for me, not always. If the technique of narrative interrogation seems to be a well-structured and ruthless pursuit, it is not. So much of the story emerges from the hinterlands of my subconscious mind.
Into the future
Though not comprehensive, hopefully this afterword has provided you with a bit of an insight into how I went about writing this novel.
We’re not quite done yet. I wanted to finish on Horus himself.
One of the aims of this book was to foreshadow Horus’ fall and Abaddon’s rise. Time is an issue for both sides, and Guilliman is not the only ticking clock.
Ever since Maloghurst sacrificed himself to bring Horus back, Horus’ days have been numbered. A part of Horus was destroyed, and with it went some of his spiritual strength. He’s still the genius he was, but increasingly the power the gods have given him is too great for him to contain. Already the gods sense this, and cast about for a successor.
Abaddon did not want to recognise it. He could not, but he knew, looking at his father’s blank face, that what Layak said was true.
‘How long does he have?’
‘Long enough, perhaps,’ said Layak. ‘His will is strong.’
‘But if it is not strong enough? If he fails now, if his soul burns out before the task is done, what will happen?’
‘Then, my lord, what happens will be what has always happened before.’ Layak looked at Abaddon. ‘There shall come another champion of Chaos.’
When looking towards the end of the Horus Heresy, we must remember that the history of the future does not stop there.
Guy Haley
Hebden Bridge
November 2018
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Titandeath, Wolfsbane and Pharos, the Primarchs novels Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter, Corax: Lord of Shadows, Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia, and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dark Imperium, Dark Imperium: Plague War, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
First published in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.
Internal artwork by Mikhail Savier.
The Lost and the Damned © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. The Lost and the Damned, The Siege of Terra, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-78999-469-8
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Backlist
Title Page
The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra
Dramatis Personae
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six<
br />
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Afterword
About the Author
A Black Library Publication