by Guy Haley
‘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.
An extract from Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter.
Corpse-grey Tsagualsa turned under the light of a sickly star. A desert world in desert space, bereft of human settlement, and so far from the illumination of the Astronomican that it would likely stay that way forever. Of no consequential size, lacking moisture beyond the merest trace, Tsagualsa had nothing to recommend itself. And yet there were those that called it home.
The Night Lords had claimed the world for themselves.
Tsagualsa suited the VIII Legion’s temperament. A bitter place, born from gas and fire as all planets are, and with the potential that entails, but faltering in the final stages of development, never reaching the exultant flourish of life that worlds round kinder suns attain. Like its new masters, as the offspring of deficient parents themselves, the planet was doomed to stunted expressions of potential.
The Night Lords had another name for the planet, bestowed with a Nostraman flair for poetry, and that was the Carrion World. Nostramans were habitual liars, and poetry is the liar’s art; Tsagualsa was so dry and dusty there was nothing alive to die to become carrion, and nothing to feed on it if it did. This lifeless state pleased their lord primarch, as an embodiment of the order he craved. Order flourished there for eternities. Nothing changed. Every mark on the planet’s surface was eventually wiped clean by abiotic winds and falls of shrouding dust. Dunes of grey sand built up and were worn down.
Until the Night Lords came.
Curze was a cancer, a creature of anarchy. The Carrion World remained changeless only while it was uninhabited. To Tsagualsa the Night Lords brought the sordid chaos of Nostramo.
The fortress the VIII Legion built for their lord was the sole outpost of life. A vast castle of black rock, decorated with the mortal remains of their victims, in aspect it was entirely grim, though its more sickening displays of the torturer’s trade were artful in their macabre way. Tens of thousands of warriors required hundreds of thousands of slaves, who forged brute societies for themselves beneath the notice of their masters. The Legion existed in a state of contained anarchy. Discipline bled away by war and indifference until, only a handful of decades after the Warmaster failed to usurp the Emperor’s throne, they were a brotherhood in name, held together only by their common blood, and that final bond was fast dissolving in the acid of their father’s madness.
On thankless, dried-up Tsagualsa, the Night Lords waited for the end.
Their father was going to die.
He was going to die that very night.
In the turret of a tower so high above
the desolate plains it swayed in constant winds, a sculptor was at work. He hummed a tune few alive would recognise, a mindless merchant’s ditty from a world broken decades before.
The sculptor ceased, stood back a moment to judge his work, and was displeased.
The figure did not capture the features right. Yes, it sat still and cold in its throne, arms gripping the rests with the iron tenacity of rigor mortis, just as the man it depicted did. The statue was of human tissue, the flesh that constituted it stolen from living beings and employed as a sculptor’s clay, as was appropriate. Many hours of work had gone into the art, unhurried and precise, though its creator had few hours left to live.
Still, it was not right.
The sculptor was the sole living occupant of the chamber. The darkness was so complete, so profound, that to anything but heat sight or supernatural vision it was impenetrable. The sculptor had a little of both. None but he would have been able to see in that room.
He was a living god, raised on a world of perpetual twilight, one of twenty incredible sons made by a man who was greater than them all, and who was himself a sculptor of sorts.
Konrad Curze was his name, and though he had many gifts bestowed upon him by his father, sanity was not among them.
‘No, no, no,’ he said. To his far-spectrum vision, his breath was a glowing cloud in the frigid air. It was strange, Curze reflected in his saner moments. Dead Nostramo was often stifling. Its darkness he longed for, but the heat he never missed. He was naked except for a short cloak of black feathers that had seen better days, but he did not feel the cold.
‘This will not do.’ Pale hands slick with blood tore off the figure’s face. It was not its original, and came free easily, the neat sutures holding it in place bursting without much effort on Curze’s part. Discarded, the face slapped onto the floor, where it began to freeze.
The man who made up the core of Curze’s flesh statue had been alive when the primarch started, nailed and screwed into place to be vivisected at leisure. His screams had enlivened the atmosphere, until he had selfishly died. Much of that first unfortunate had been replaced: his arms had grown long with extra joints, four mismatched legs were seated in place of the two he had started with, his torso was split and spliced with a second spine, his head had become a conglomeration of four broken skulls, and silence substituted for his voice.
Curze stood back again. His bare feet padded on the freezing floor without discomfort. He placed his chin in his bloody hand, and looked over his work with a critical eye.
‘I really can’t capture the face,’ he said regretfully.
He remembered it clearly enough; he was a primarch, and even one so damaged as he forgot nothing. But when he tried to capture the face he saw in his mind, it flowed away from him like blood gurgling into a gutter. Frustrated, he paced back and forth, pausing to stare at various angles.
The chamber was large. There was one high window set into the wall that kept out the spearing light of stars. Tsagualsa’s air was thin, its sun weak, and not enough light troubled the surface of the world for most eyes to function at night, but Curze found starlight too bright to bear, and the panes of the window were a midnight collage of armourglass tinted to block it out. What image the tenebrous design depicted was impossible to say, even for him. That was a mercy, for the picture was of the most disturbing sort – the kind which, once seen, forever haunts the small hours, and chips madness from the rock of the sturdiest mind.
To a mortal man the room would have been a terrifying dungeon ripe with death’s stink. Blind, that man would nevertheless have sensed Curze as a darkness in the dark.
There had been mortal men in the chamber. They knew fear no longer.
The walls were stone blended with bone wrenched from a thousand screaming victims. The floor was black iron, patterned with razor ridges, caked in frozen blood. The arms, legs, torsos, heads, brains, hearts, guts and voided shit of two dozen slaughtered mortals were strewn all around, in some places heaped together, all placed without thought or reason – the raw materials for Curze’s statue. More bodies hung from hooks riveted to the walls, the ragged remains of faces locked in death’s agonies.
A sole space was neat: a circle around an iron lectern fashioned in the form of a bat’s outflung wings, which carried a heavy book bound in human skin.
‘What to do, what to do?’
Curze tapped a black nail against his face, sighed, and went back to work. For another hour he ripped and tore and stitched, chewing flesh to softness when he needed to, before pressing the dripping putty into place. He spoke occasionally as he harvested his materials from the floor. Every soft sibilance – Nostraman was heavily blessed with them – whispered over the stone and bone, quiet and poisonous as snakes. Each smacking kiss made as he tore flesh from the piles of corpse parts echoed sharply. His breath rattled. It was a predator’s cave, full of a predator’s sounds. The abode of an ailing lion, close to death but all the deadlier because of it.
Eventually he nodded in relief.
‘I think I almost have you, father,’ he said, and set himself on the finishing touches.
It took him a while to fit the face he chose to the agglomerate skulls. He stretched it, warming it with tender care before tugging at it with teeth and hands. When he judged the face the correct size, he stitched it in place, taut as a drumskin. The stolen hide rebelled against its new shape, pulling hard against threads spun from human hair, but it held. Curze stepped back, a pleased hiss announcing he was satisfied.
He padded to the far side of the room, and squatted down facing the figure, folding long arms in front of himself as a roosting bat might close its wings. His form had become more bestial since the days of the great betrayal. His fingers were long and clutching, his spine strained against the skin of his back, his ribs arching up to it like those of a vaulted roof, and in brighter places than the chamber, the webs of his veins were clear beneath his pallid skin. This corruption was not his fault. None of this was.
The monstrous statue stared back at him in rigid quiet, its eyes sightless, stretched mouth tight with a rueful smile. Beneath the frozen blood painting the throne, gold glinted.
Curze waited patiently for the figure to speak. Time ticked away towards his demise. Unlike the rapid flood of years of his long life, these last hours stretched ahead, wide and placid, a river close to its joining with the sea. Time at the end was slow and deep, wrinkled still with the turbulence of maybes, yet headed in one undeniable direction.
He was going to die soon, in that palace, on that night, as he had always known.
Curze felt no impatience. He was calm.
‘Father,’ said Curze with a wicked smile.
The figure remained still. The composite jaw was locked, the elongated lips stretched immovably taut.
Curze waited for the words to thump into his mind, and scatter their sadness all over his tattered soul.
‘Konrad Curze,’ he said at length, when the figure said nothing at all. Curze scowled and raked at his ear like a dog. ‘I don’t like that name. Why do you call me it?’
The mess of body parts stared silently back.
‘Silent? So be it.’ Konrad Curze piled up a heap of limbs and sat upon it. ‘So. I am going to tell you a story,’ he said. ‘About why you are a very bad father.’ He tittered. A tic shook its way from his left elbow, up across his shoulders and through his face. It ended with a jerk in his neck that sent his filthy black hair swinging. Curze growled in annoyance at the involuntary movement, and when he spoke again he did so quickly, so that his speech would outpace his spasms.
‘You know what’s going to happen soon.’ He tilted his head, listening. ‘Can you hear the silence? This place is never quiet. Not ever. Do you know why it is?’ he said conspiratorially. ‘You know why, I know you. You know everything!’ His voice dropped. ‘My sons grieve my coming death. They hate me for
not allowing them to prevent it.’ His gaze slid slyly around, coming to rest on a fused ribcage far bigger than a normal man’s on the far side of the room. ‘If they try to stop her, they’ll die, and they don’t want to die. So we will not be disturbed.’ He smirked, then composed himself. He managed to hold the mask of sanity before his tortured face when speaking with his sons, but it was hard not to show it here, speaking with his father. This was far more intimate.
‘Yes,’ he said, answering his thoughts as if the meat sculpture had voiced them. ‘This is you as father and I as son. When we are fathers, we must be strong. When we are sons, we can be weak, for our own fathers are strong for us. I believe that’s the way it’s supposed to work.’ He blinked eyes so dilated the iris was a nearly invisible, compressed band between sclera and pupil. Curze’s sneer dropped away. His expression became open, and ashamed. In that moment he appeared beautiful despite his degeneration.
‘Father, this is my confessional. I don’t expect you to forgive me.’ He said the last part loudly and fast, just in case the figure would offer forgiveness. ‘And I can never forgive you.’ He leaned forwards, his head jutting out on a neck that had grown too long. His bony shoulders hunched up over his head. In their cloak of feathers they resembled the wings of a scavenger bird held high off the carcass it fed upon. ‘I just want you to listen.’
He implored his father silently. When no reply was forthcoming, the sneer returned, and his head jerked again.
Curze giggled foolishly. He pressed his hands together before his face in a mockery of prayer.
‘Forgive me, father,’ he said in rasping High Gothic, ‘for I have sinned.’
The Night Haunter waited for his father’s response to his joke. When none came, he frowned peevishly, and said with irritation, ‘How shall I enumerate your failures? Shall I tell you why your plans will wither eternally, and bear no fruit for Terra’s dead vines?’