by Guy Haley
The heat from the blade slaves grew. Their armour cracked, forced apart by bodies swelling underneath. Flesh boiled out of the rents in the ceramite. Their unclean swords leapt from their scabbards into waiting hands, where they lengthened, additional mass unravelling from smoke and darkness into heavy, unnatural blades of bone. Ash sifted from the heat shimmer cloaking them. Embers drifting from their bodies hissed in the black channels below the walk. They presented their weapons, hunching into combat postures far removed from the forms trained into them as legionaries.
With one gesture, Abaddon could condemn them all. He clenched his fists, and looked sidelong at his men. One gesture.
‘You would slaughter me while I pay respect to your genesire?’ said Layak. ‘I saved your life, First Captain. There is a cost to that.’
‘I saved yours too, if I recall. I owe you nothing.’
Layak raised his hand and twitched his fingers. The blade slaves stood to attention. The hell-light burning in their helm lenses dimmed, and their swords shrank away until they looked like any legionary gladius, and were sheathed.
Abaddon grunted dismissively.
‘Your death would be an unwelcome distraction,’ he said. He looked back to his father. The light of the energies racing around Horus’ head played over the armour of the group. ‘When will he wake?’
‘He does not sleep,’ said Layak. ‘Horus’ affinity with the warp grows by the hour. His powers swell. The Warmaster has gone into the past.’ He clasped his strange staff in front of him and bowed his head. ‘Pray with me,’ he said, ‘for your father goes to seek out the Emperor.’
Terra, the past
Having allowed himself the briefest glimpse of Terra’s approaching orb, Horus kept his eyes closed during the whole of the descent. He wanted his first sight of the world to be the interior of his father’s Palace, for that was where all the power of mankind was concentrated.
‘I look to the future. The grey dust of today’s Terra is the past.’ That was what he told his companions when they asked why he closed his eyes. They smiled at his words. Horus had a way with men, to speak profundity laced with humour that did not lessen what he spoke of, but raised it up. When he joked, he mocked himself. When he teased his friends he did so more gently than he teased himself. He was humble in his confidence. To be in his company was to feel oneself his comrade, regardless of what station one might hold.
‘The matter of Terra is greater than I,’ he said, as the drop-ship started the shake and moan of re-entry. He settled into his restraints, nestling his great head in the padded brace. ‘I want to see what will be, not what has been. Terra is old and used up, but it will be great again. The Palace of the Emperor is the centre of this change. From it, authority shall spread, uniting mankind as one people for the first time in thousands of years. Why would I look upon the ruin of what is now, when one day the world shall live again, and thrill to new life returned to it by the efforts of the highest power? When my father’s work is done, and all Old Earth’s glories are restored, then I shall look upon it fully.’
‘So long as it leads to a good fight,’ growled the first of his companions, the largest and the strongest.
The other three of his four companions spoke their agreement. They relaxed and shut their eyes too. Always, men copied his example, out of respect, and love.
They fell through the sky in silence, rocked hard by pockets of denser air, until the thrusters ignited and burned to full, and the party felt themselves grow heavier. Landing claws spread upon the ground with loud rings.
The ship’s roaring engines cut out, and were replaced by a noise greater still.
‘My lord, they are shouting your name!’ said the fourth of his companions, his voice pure as silver bells.
‘Lead me to them,’ said Horus, his eyes still closed.
The restraint cradle clacked open, and rose with a hiss. His companions took his giant hands in theirs, and guided him eagerly to the gangplank. Waves of adulation roared into the hold as the doors parted and the ramp fell, so loud Horus’ ears sang and his warriors had to shout to be heard.
‘They love you, my lord! They love you!’ said his second companion.
‘They do not know me,’ said Horus.
‘They love you anyway,’ shouted the second. He was wise, his words considered, but there was an undertone of suspicion in his voice that resonated with Horus’ own most guarded fears, and the primarch’s smile wavered.
‘Come, my lord! Come! Such life is in the crowd, such pleasure to be had,’ said the third companion. ‘A profusion of people! They call to you!’
The others were enthused by the jollity of the third, even the grim and growling first, and pulled Horus down the gangplank. The noise grew louder as he emerged from the shadow of the ship’s belly and the people saw him.
‘Open your eyes,’ whispered the fourth sweetly.
Horus did so to the cheers of a million people.
The Emperor, his father, had prepared him as best He could for the sight of the Imperial Palace, but what Horus had taken for boastfulness he saw now was modesty. The Emperor’s description of His plans had in no way encapsulated what Horus saw. Only half-finished, the Imperial Palace exceeded anything he had ever seen. Nothing on Cthonia could compare. Not even the great starships that had come for him and borne him away from his home came close in scale, or majesty, or ambition.
For only the second time in his life, Horus felt awe.
‘Such vision!’ he said.
‘It is overweening,’ said his second companion. ‘His understanding of history’s flow is simplistic, and His project will fall.’
‘If it does, it will fall and rise again, as all things fall and rise,’ said the third.
‘It is beautiful!’ said the fourth.
The first said nothing.
Horus glanced askance at him. The four were his brothers from Cthonia, warriors who had been with him since the beginning, but he found at that precise moment that he could not recall their names. The first had a warrior’s ugliness, pitted and battered, his nose flat, shaved head scarred, forever on the edge of violence. The second was a scholar, waspish in temperament. Heterochromatic eyes looked calculatingly upon everything. His face shifted into uncertain shapes beyond the human form. Horus frowned. He did not know their names! The third was heavier than the rest, fully fleshed and jolly. Yet flakes of skin at the corner of his mouth and red rims around his eyes displayed an imbalance in his humours.
The fourth distracted him, slipping his slender hand back into Horus’ own, and leading him deeper into the Palace. ‘My brother! My lord!’ he laughed gaily. This one wore his hair in elaborate knots, and coloured his cheeks. His eyes were bright with pleasure. ‘They adore you!’
Music played from every quarter. Wafers of gold leaf fluttered from the spires either side of the road. The buildings were tall and beautiful, but every window lacked for glass. Columns waiting for statues were placed at fifty-metre intervals, until they ran out, and only sockets for their placing were visible. Not far from the processional way the marble cladding gave way to rockcrete, and the rich pavement stopped. Nothing was finished. Freezing wind whipped up the crimson standards, each flap and flutter drawing the eye to another incomplete artwork, or another tower swathed in scaffolding. The thin air carried multiple chemical taints blown up from the poisoned world. The whole place was a work in progress, yet the people within the unfinished walls cheered and roared as if they were already triumphant, ignorant of how very far they had to go to achieve their master’s dream.
The road Horus and his four companions trod was of a gleaming stone, amber as a lion’s eyes. Upon it was a purple carpet a kilometre in length. At the end, on a dais made with enough art and beauty to persist ten thousand years, though it would be demolished as soon as Horus professed his fealty, was a throne of gold. A double-headed eagle formed its ba
ck, its wings outspread, its claws grasping stylised lightning bolts which thrust jaggedly out over the crowds lining the way. It was preposterously sized. Horus himself, bigger than any two mortal men combined, would have vanished into its seat. But even though the being upon it seemed to be but a man and no gene-forged giant, he overfilled it, his presence spilling out in a blaze of light so glaring Horus had to narrow his eyes to keep walking forwards. His four companions hung back, afraid. Though they had seen the Emperor before and borne His presence bravely, this time they trailed after Horus like frightened children. He lost respect for them, there and then, that they never fully recovered.
Was that how it was? Something was wrong with all this. He had lived these events before, he was sure. The Palace had all the solidity of a memory, a spun-glass recollection perfect in every detail, as all his memories were, but nothing more than a fragile echo of time gone, never to be experienced again.
The four who accompanied him were the cause of the dissonance. The advisors who walked with him the day he came to Terra were not these four men. Those companions had been his first Mournival, beloved comrades from Cthonia who were too old to take legionary apotheosis, and who aged and died with disappointing rapidity.
It was right that these false friends should hang back. They should not have been there. Something in the light hated them.
Horus walked through the roaring acclaim, and his humility fled before it. So many shouts for a being the crowd did not know or understand, and never could. He was a weapon made by an oppressor. If his so-called father had commanded him, he would have killed every single one of them without a thought, and he would have made the massacre seem just. That was the truth of it.
The Emperor was anything but just. His achievements were founded on falsehood.
The Emperor was a liar.
Horus looked at the Palace again.
The towering arches were the expression of arrogance. The walls symbols of oppression. The very idea of Imperium was inimical to the freedom every man had held dear since the first examples of humanity dropped from the trees and walked out into the grasslands. The Emperor was a tyrant like every other tyrant.
‘Can you not see what He is?’ Horus shouted boldly. ‘He brings you slavery in the guise of liberation.’ But the words were not heard by the crowd. He could not affect the memory.
Time is a river. It flows only where it can. It is bound by laws as sure as that of gravity. Horus cheatingly followed the path of before like a man can return to a river’s source and walk its length again. He remembered now. Events must play out as they did. Some beings, however, are timeless. Through the act of remembering, Horus escaped time’s shackles. The Emperor’s soul had never felt time’s lash so heavily as other men, and so there, in memory, father and son met.
Horus’ spirit walked out of step with his former self. He looked through the back of his own head as his past and present moved out of synchronisation. How naive he had been. How excited by this outpouring of affection. He had been taken in completely. He allowed himself to be angry about that.
Horus and his small party came to the foot of the steps. From the great chair, the Emperor stared down at him. There was imperious pride and triumph in His face as He looked upon His creation. But no love. Never that. From the vantage of the present, Horus looked back upon the Emperor’s affection and saw it for a sham.
Back then, he had not known. Back then, he had believed.
Horus of Cthonia and Warmaster Horus knelt before the man who would become a god – the first shaking with joy at reunion with his father, the second disgusted by himself.
Silence fell. From His high seat, the Emperor intoned, ‘Horus of Cthonia! Do you swear fealty to me, your creator, the Emperor of Mankind? Do you swear to serve me faithfully, to bring the light of the Imperium to every world touched by the hand of our people, to protect them from the dark, to deliver them from ignorance, to give them succour when they are in need, to guide them where they falter, to save them when they are in danger…’
The Emperor went on with His list of pompous demands.
Warmaster Horus looked up while his weakling former self grovelled in the light. His mouth split far wider than a human’s could, evincing a reptilian smile.
‘Hello, father,’ he said.
It is not enough that you pursue me through metaphor and dreamscapes? Now you chase me down the roads of what has been,+ said the Emperor.
‘I will chase you where I must, father,’ he replied. His smile spread. ‘You sound tired.’
Snow whipped past Horus from the shadows of a forest hidden on the edge of sight. Lupine shapes prowled behind him, panting hot breaths, eyes of red, green, pink and blue shining from shadowy faces.
Be careful, Horus,+ the too-perfect voice rang in his head. +The past gives me strength. It has worn itself into the fabric of things, and cannot be altered. It is not mutable like the place you made your last attempt on my soul, and that did not end so well for you.+
Light flared. Horus was pushed back away from his former self as he ecstatically pledged to follow the cause of crusade. Behind the glare Horus saw another Emperor, a man in pain, bound to a seat He could not leave, holding back a tide of darkness while a lone sentinel waited, hammer in hand, before a sealed gate. And past that, a third version of the Emperor, fleetingly glimpsed, this one a corpse trapped within a machine grown monstrous around His throne.
The Warmaster laughed, and pushed back, drawing on the might of his allies.
‘I was weak. Now I am not.’ The light dimmed. ‘The truth makes me strong.’
False strength derived from false truths. As you draw it, it eats you alive from the inside. Drag upon their lies as much as you wish – you are not strong enough to come against me in this way, my wayward son, and you never shall be.+
The Emperor of the past continued to speak. ‘Will you, Horus, first of my primarchs, stand by my side and shepherd humanity into a new era of prosperity and peace, where no xenos race might oppress us, and no fault of our nature undo us?’ The Emperor stared at him with His rich, brown eyes, and it was the man of the past and the man of the moment combined when He spoke next. ‘Do you swear this, Horus, do you swear it?’
Light swamped Horus Lupercal’s form, and cast him from nowhere into somewhere.
The Vengeful Spirit, Lunar orbit, 14th of Secundus
An hour passed before Layak raised his head.
‘He returns to us.’
The lights circling Horus sped faster and faster, grew brighter, burst apart and fled shrieking for the furthest corners of the hall, where they died in flickers of witchfire. A moment later, Horus stirred. His eyelids flickered like those of a stupefied man coming round, showing only the whites, and refusing to open fully.
‘Horus.’ Abaddon moved for his father. Layak’s hand shot out and grasped his forearm.
‘Do not touch him!’ he hissed.
Frost spread over the Warmaster’s black armour, turning the glaring eye on his chest milky blind. It melted as fast as it formed. The reactor buried within the Warmaster’s battleplate whined with building power, and Horus lolled sideways with a groan, pawing at the arms of his seat for support.
‘Father,’ said Abaddon, appalled by the display of weakness.
Horus held up his hand to silence his son. The jointing of his Terminator armour prevented him from slumping far forwards, but his head hung within the cowl.
‘Father,’ Abaddon repeated.
‘I am well, my son, do not be afraid,’ said the primarch. He lifted his eyes to meet Abaddon’s. In the dark they shone silverly, like those of a felid caught in a beam of light. ‘You disgrace yourself with your fretting, First Captain. Nothing ails me. Far from it.’
With a sigh of armour motors, Horus Lupercal stood. Light danced along the claws of his armour as he activated them and inspected them, and skittered
away to nothing when he shut them down. Abaddon relaxed. There was the man he had pledged to follow. There was his father. There was the future Emperor of Mankind.
‘The Emperor is afraid. Our time comes,’ Horus said. His huge head turned, taking in the party before him as if seeing them for the first time. ‘Why do you disturb my meditations? Why are you not on your ship, Abaddon?’
‘I wished to see you myself, my lord,’ said Abaddon. Energy beat upon him from Horus’ engorged soul. Kneel, it demanded. Kneel before me.
Abaddon would not kneel.
‘I wanted to look at your face with my own eyes,’ Abaddon continued, ‘and ask you why, when Terra is within our grasp, do we delay?’
Horus stared at him. The weight of his regard pushed at Abaddon’s being.
Kneel, the demand came again, this time fully voiced within his mind.
Abaddon’s armour sighed as his muscles strained within his Terminator plate. He would not kneel!
‘You wait too long, father,’ Abaddon continued. ‘Your armies stand ready for your command. Everything is in place. The last geno-temples of the Selenites are in our hands. All resistance has been purged from Terra’s orbits. The bombardment proceeds as you ordered. Terra burns, my lord. But we wait here. We give our enemies time. We give them strength.’
‘We are not yet gathered,’ said Horus. Such power was contained in his words it scalded Abaddon’s soul. ‘You push at the bounds of your authority, my son.’
‘I will not apologise, nor shall I beg your forgiveness,’ said Abaddon. ‘The Mournival exists to speak truth to you, and I do so now. We risk everything. Mortarion, primarch of the Death Guard, and all his Legion have broken warp and sail for our position,’ he continued. ‘You should know this, and be ready to act. Instead, I find you slumped on your throne. You allow yourself to be influenced by this priest. You waste your time in worship.’