by John French
“‘You… atone… by… living… until… until the last… blow… of the sword.’ Something in the ruin of meat and twisted armour shifted. It might have been a hand reaching to grasp, or just the shudder of life fleeing the will holding it. ‘Until… the last blow… of the sword… Swear it to me.’
‘You have my oath,’ said Sigismund.
The machines stopped. A high wail replaced the bubbling hiss and thump.
‘And you… mine… my brother…’ said Boreas. His eye flashed clear for a moment, his gaze steady as it held Sigismund’s. ‘Always.’
Beyond the stone walls of the room, beyond the hull of the ship lancing through the void, beyond the ships of the fleet that followed it, the Solar System turned on, silent and unceasing.”
The war does not stop for these deaths, but keeps on going on into the future and does not look back.
All the way back to the beginning
“‘So will I deal with all tyrants and deceivers,’ rumbled a deep voice.
Loken looked up at the god standing over him.
‘Lupercal…’ he murmured.
The god smiled. ‘Not so formal, please, captain,’ whispered Horus.”
Almost a decade and a half, and over 5,000,000 words have passed since the moment Horus spoke on the page for the first time in Horus Rising. A lot of story has happened since that moment. So, the first thing I chose to do when deciding about writing this book was make its central character the person who, along with Garviel Loken, had started the whole thing going: Mersadie Oliton. She is, almost literally, the spirit of those early stories making a last journey though these pages. In fact, her first section in The Solar War opens with a deliberate repeat of part of her first meeting with Loken in Horus Rising:
“‘I understand you have a story…’ she said. The wolf stood before her, the fur of its back silver beneath the moonlight. ‘A particularly entertaining one. I’d like to remember it, for posterity.’
The wolf turned, its teeth a smile of sorrow.
‘Which story?’
‘Horus killing the Emperor.’
Mersadie Oliton woke from the memory-dream with sweat on her face.”
Mersadie holds the threads of The Solar War’s heart, as she did in the first books of the Horus Heresy. She sees the themes of the story and the universe they weave through the book. She is, in a way, us, the reader: a human looking into a vast universe and focusing down to the point where it touches normal people’s lives.
“[…] if there are arch-traitors and saints, then hope is their realm, the realm of cosmic change and slaughter and sorrow. They are the ones who will decide tomorrow, and if there are any tomorrows after that. We are human, Master Vek. Our lives only matter in quantity. We can dream and despair and cling on to what we have, but those things live only in us. Our hope is our own, and if the universe cares, it does so by accident. That is why people pray to the Emperor and call my old friend a saint. Because deep down, they know that they cannot change the great course of events.’
‘You have a very bleak view for someone claiming to be trying to help save the last fortress of humanity.’”
That human view, subjective and limited, is one of the hallmarks of the Horus Heresy series from its earliest stories. Mersadie can’t see everything that is going on. She moves through a vast and terrifying conflict that is made larger, not smaller, because it is seen from the eyes of someone looking up at demigods tearing apart existence.
Arrivals and endings
So here we are, and there is still a little more to tell of the story of the Horus Heresy, not much when compared with what has passed, but a lot when weighed in the balance. If you will indulge me, I have one more note to share, a little personal, but that’s the way of it.
I have lived with the stories of the Horus Heresy for years, written a few of them, talked about them, argued about them, and made the finest friends in the process. There were times when I didn’t think we would finish it, and one of us didn’t make it to see that we did.
All that past creates a force that bears down on this last set of stories with a weight of time and lives lived, of memories and hopes that worked out better than we dared, or remain unlived. And those memories and lives are not just mine or those of the other authors that have told the stories; they are your lives and your memories.
These last few stories matter because we have all come on a journey through years and countless words, and we are here at last, and it was the kind of journey you only get to go on once.
So, when Mersadie talks to Loken for the last time, I have to confess that part of me thinks that she is speaking to the truth that I will miss this great and wonderous beast of a story when it is done.
“‘I am sorry,’ she said, before he could speak. ‘I am sorry, but I doubt anyone will ever know your story.’ She laughed. ‘Maybe for the best – it’s a good tale, but I have always thought that I would struggle to do it justice. Ignace would have been better. It would have looked fine in verse. The making and undoing of a dream by beings greater than men, but weaker than gods.’
She saw him twitch. Blood coughed from his mouth. He spat, shook his head.
‘I have always struggled with poetry,’ he said. He looked at the sword lying on the deck between them.
A heartbeat of time passed. He did not move. The sword lay still on the metal of the gantry.
Mersadie smiled one last time.
‘Thank you, old friend,’ she said.
And let herself fall back into the glow of the plasma conduit.
A howl of rage tore into her mind as a presence like night poured back into her soul.
She fell, and the voices of her past spoke one last time.
‘I understand you have a story… I’d like to remember it, for posterity.’
‘Which story?’”
John French
Nottingham
October 2018
SPECIAL THANKS
There are too many people to thank, but in particular thanks to Liz French for her love and understanding, to Ead Brown, for his friendship and steady presence, to Laurie Goulding, for those early chats, to Alan Bligh, for all the ideas left in memory, to Aaron Dembski-Bowden, for insight and clarity delivered at the perfect time, to Lindsey Priestley, for notes and thoughts, to Rachel Harrison, for amazing art direction, to Karen Miksza and Abigail Harvey, for making my mistakes appear as though they never were, to Neil Roberts, for that cover.
And lastly, but most importantly in my eyes, thank you to Nick Kyme, for the chance, for his faith in me, and for helping me cross the finish line. Thank you, my friend.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John French is the author of several Horus Heresy stories including the novels Praetorian of Dorn, Tallarn and Slaves to Darkness, the novella The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Dark Compliance, Templar and Warmaster. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Resurrection and Incarnation for The Horusian Wars and two tie-in audio dramas – the Scribe award-winning Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies and Agent of the Throne: Truth and Dreams. John has also written the Ahriman series and many short stories.
An extract from The Buried Dagger.
The frosts always came in the dead of night, despite the best efforts of the Imperial Palace’s weather management systems. They were gone by dawn, so few but those who patrolled the Eagle’s Highway would ever have seen the way the thin patina of ice shone on the dark antipode marble, as it caught the light of ships passing along the sky-corridors above. In the past, many who came to the Emperor’s earthly domain observed the highway from a distance and thought it to be a purely ornamental feature. It stood so far up above the Precinct and the great towers of the Inner Palace that it seemed to float there, a ribbon of stone drifting in low clouds, defying crude gravity by the sheer beauty and wonder of its existence. It was a minor glory among the magnificen
ce of the Terran capital, but a glory nevertheless.
Wyntor imagined that such thoughts had never even occurred to the Praetorian, before he began demolishing the path. Dorn, in one of the endless diktats of defensive measure he had issued since returning to Terra, labelled the Eagle’s Highway as both a military weakness and a waste of resources. Large sections of it had been deconstructed and the marble repurposed for ugly, battlefield uses. Talking to a wine-seller of his acquaintance on the Avenue of Sacrifice, Wyntor learned that the stone was now a series of gargantuan tank traps out on the Katabatic Slopes, and at the time the news had been enough to make him weep.
That seemed like such a terrible thing. An act of martial, uncultured barbarity in the name of a war yet to arrive, a hard-souled soldier taking a chisel to a thing of transcendent splendour in order to carve himself another graceless redoubt. But now that ignominy seemed utterly trivial.
Pretty marble meant nothing. Beauty meant nothing. Not when ranged against the horrors of what Wyntor knew now. The secrets he had been told had unseated his reason. A lesser man might have gone mad to know them. Perhaps, in some subtle way, he had.
Wyntor’s thoughts inexorably slipped back towards the revelations and the dark realities lurking in the back of his mind, and the giddy, terrifying rush they brought up threatened to overwhelm him. It was as if he were being stalked by the medusae out of ancient Hellenik myth. To look directly into the eyes of this truth would petrify his flesh and bone.
His flimsy leather shoes, over-elaborate and made for soft, carpeted domiciles, slapped on the frosty stone. Wyntor skidded to a halt to catch his breath, hiding in the lee of a carved griffon. The cold marble burned at the soles of his feet, and the icy air at this great altitude was hard and heavy in his lungs.
Rake-thin and taller than most men, on other days he would have been more graceful than his gangly form suggested. Beneath the hooded robes he wore, his colouring was that of deep sand, and above an elegant chin and a regal face, his violet-hued eyes flitted back and forth on the verge of panic. A learned observer who knew human cultures might have guessed he was of Yndonesic extraction, and they would have been gravely mistaken.
His heart hammered against the inside of his chest. It had taken him several days to store up enough courage to make the escape attempt, and now he was fully committed to it. Wyntor did not look back the way he had come, for fear of seeing the towers and minarets of the Palace. He wanted to remember them as the beautiful and unsullied things that had greeted him on his first arrival here a decade ago. He was afraid that if he gazed at them now, he would only see the lies they stood upon, and the awful reality kept hidden from the Imperium at large.
If only they knew, he thought, looking away towards the lights of the Petitioner’s City thousands of metres below. What would the people say if they knew what I do? If they could see the truth behind the insurrection?
But those were questions he could not even begin to fathom a reply for. All that mattered in this moment was flight. He had to flee the Palace, put as much distance between himself and the truth, get as far away as he possibly could from him.
The sound of his voice. The cadence of his footfalls. The rasp of his robes, that faint but ever-present scent of amasec in his chambers.
Wyntor felt this collection of elements forming into a recollection of the man and he stamped down on them, dispelling the moment before a name took shape in his mind. If he were to think fully of that face, it would be too late.
‘He will know,’ Wyntor said aloud, sucking in a deep breath to steel himself. ‘I won’t go back.’
He dashed out from behind the statue and ran as quickly as he dared, keeping his head bowed, one hand fishing in a deep pocket for the stolen cypher key that would allow him to use one of the Palace’s transit flyers. The little craft would be able to get him to the plains. If he was quick, if this could be done before an alert was posted, he could escape.
To his credit, anyone else would have been caught already. But then there were few who knew the byways of the Imperial Palace as well as Wyntor did. The study and documentation of its architecture and construction had been his sole duty for the longest time. He knew how the Guardsmen patrolled, and in which sectors the Custodes held their vigils. It was said it would take a lifetime of study to know the dominions of the Emperor’s bastion, but that was the dedication of Wyntor’s existence.
Or at least it had been, until the conversations began. If he could have gone back to that first day, to that chance meeting in the gardens, he would have refused the offer. The glass of fine Venusian wine. The pieces assembled on a regicide board, awaiting a match.
‘I have so few opponents…’
‘No.’ He spat out the word. Too close. He almost thought of the name. Be careful.
Wyntor was so deep in his fear that he almost stumbled over the temporary barrier that had been erected across the access ramp to the pad. He flinched away and a breath of wind caught his hood, pulling it back to let the long, jet streaks of his hair fall loose. He gripped the cypher key so tightly that it cut into the palm of his hand.
The landing stage was gone.
Blinking, he cast around, momentarily afraid that he had made a mistake and set off on the wrong path along the Eagle’s Highway; but no, he knew for certain that was not so. The griffon statue confirmed it. He was in the right place.
But the flyer pad was not where it should be. How could it be gone? He inched forward, pushing at the barrier, and looked down at the sheer drop where before there had been a marble platform ringed with auto-servicers for transit craft, aeronefs and civilian ornithopters.
Then he understood. The stone had been cut with the harsh mathematics of a laser, with nubs of reinforcing flex-steel protruding here and there where the framework had been forcibly removed by combat engineers. It was another of Dorn’s works, something else the Praetorian had carved off the Palace to repurpose to his military whim.
I should have known that, Wyntor told himself, frustration rising to the fore. Why did I come up here? Why did I think this path would take me away?
A troubling possibility occurred to him. Perhaps he had made Wyntor follow this route from the very start. That would be like him, to build an elaborate scheme just so he could prove a point, rather than merely speak the words and be done with it.
The panic Wyntor had been holding in broke the banks of his self-control, and he felt himself tremble as he turned back.
Blocking his path was a legionary in full battle armour of the Corvus iteration, his war-plate cast in the unadorned slate-grey of the Chosen. A Knight-Errant.
‘Stay where you are,’ said the warrior. He almost sounded uncertain.
‘I won’t go!’ called out the man, jerking backwards in shock. Humans were often surprised at the stealth with which a legionary could move, and this combined with the shock effect of seeing a transhuman at close quarters could terrify even the hardiest of them.
This one did not seem robust by any measure, as he opened his long-fingered hands in a gesture of not-quite-surrender. A datum card dropped to the stonework at his feet and the wind pushed it away, out of reach.
‘That choice is not yours to make,’ said Tylos Rubio, keeping his tone level as he removed his helmet. He hoped that looking the man in the eye might make this easier.
The alert vox had said little about the fugitive, concentrating more on a wide-band message to all stations that the man was to be arrested on sight and detained for questioning. He did not seem dangerous – but the psyker had too much experience of the commonplace becoming the uncanny to relax his guard, even for an instant. Rubio had chosen to delay his imminent departure from the Palace in order to join the search, compelled to do so by an impulse that he could not directly identify.
His bolt pistol hung holstered at his belt, and his free hand rested on the gold Ultima forged at the hilt of his force
sword, the weapon quiet for the moment in its scabbard. Rubio’s stance communicated a warning to any who looked upon him. He was a scion of the Legiones Astartes, and as such danger was inherent in everything he did.
Once, Rubio had served with pride in the XIII Legion, the Ultramarines. First as a psyker-warrior of the Librarius, and then after the Edict of Nikaea had forbidden the use of his powers, as a line Space Marine. But that felt like a lifetime ago. Here and now, his allegiance was turned towards a more clandestine end, as were his more ephemeral abilities.
Rubio was not just a legionary – although the genhanced warrior-kind of any Legion were never ‘just’ anything; he was a gifted fighter on the battlefield of the metaphysical as well as the material. A psychic hood, a complex device of crystalline matrices and psi-tuned alloys, rose up behind his head, glowing with a soft inner light. The hood had been at rest during his ascent to the Eagle’s Highway, but now he was close to this human, it awoke of its own accord and pushed new awareness into his mind.
Or rather, it showed him the lack of something. Rubio’s eyes narrowed as he reached out with a subtle telepathic probe, reading the ebb and flow of energy around the thin man in the robes.
Nothing.
Where the colours of a human psyche should have coiled and drifted like living smoke, there was a void without depth. Rubio’s psionic senses recoiled from him, repulsed by the literal anti-form to his own powers.
‘You are a pariah,’ he said.
Those of a more fanciful bent than the former Ultramarine would have said the man was without a soul, but Rubio did not believe in such ephemera. Rather, he saw clearly that the fugitive was of the rare, one-in-ten-million breed whose psionic trace was diametrically inverted. Where others left an imprint on the invisible tides of the empyrean, this unfortunate had only nothingness within him. In some cases, such a being could be disturbing to the equilibrium of a psyker, even metaphysically dangerous. Rubio did not sense that threat here, however.
