‘Aye, well, can’t have folk thinking the Wolves make something weaker than the X Legion,’ said Bror. ‘We’d never hear the end of it.’
‘So what is it you really want?’ said Loken. ‘I’m not much in the mood for company.’
‘Don’t be foolish, man,’ scoffed Bror. ‘Any time you walk away from a fight is just the time to be with your brothers.’
‘Even when I failed?’
Bror leaned forward and aimed his cup at Loken. ‘We didn’t fail,’ he said. ‘We did what we set out to do, we marked the Vengeful Spirit. When the Wolf King comes to fight Horus, he’ll have an easier time of it because of what we did.’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Loken not wishing to dwell on broken promises. ‘But Lupercal knows about the futharc sigils.’
Bror sighed. ‘He won’t find them all, and do you think I’d make them all work by being seen. Ah, Loken, you’ve a lot to learn about how clever the Rout really are.’
‘I lost half the men under my command.’
Bror refilled his cup and said, ‘Listen, you didn’t lose them. They died. It happens. But you don’t make sense of deaths in solitude. Mortals might, but we’re not mortals. We’re a brotherhood. A brotherhood of warriors, and that’s what makes us strong. I thought you knew that?’
‘I think maybe I’d forgotten,’ said Loken.
‘Aye, you and this one both,’ said Bror, nodding towards Severian.
‘Alone is where I do my best work,’ said Severian.
‘That’s as maybe, but the rest of us fight best when we fight with our brothers,’ said Bror, knocking back his drink and continuing without pause. ‘It’s fighting for the man next to you. It’s fighting for the man next to him and the one next to him. I heard what you said to Horus, so I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But what you’re after? You already have it. Right here, right now. With us.’
Loken nodded and held his cup out for a refill.
‘Right, enough with the sermonising,’ said Severian. ‘We want to know what Iacton Qruze gave you. Do you still have it?’
‘I do, but I don’t know what to make of it.’
‘Let’s see it then,’ said Bror.
Loken reached up to a small alcove above his bunk and lifted down a metal box. A box very like the one he’d left aboard the Vengeful Spirit, filled with his few keepsakes of war.
He opened it and lifted out the object Qruze had pressed into his palm. A disc of hardened red wax affixed to a long strip of yellowed seal paper.
‘His Oath of Moment?’ said Severian.
‘The one Mersadie Oliton had me give to Iacton.’
Loken turned it around, so that Bror and Severian could see what was written on the oath paper.
They read the word and looked at Loken.
‘What does it mean?’ asked Bror.
‘I don’t know,’ said Loken, staring down at the word.
Its letters were inked in red that had faded to rust brown.
Scratched by something needle-sharp and precise.
Murder.
The corridors of Molech’s Enlightenment were cold and cramped. Vivyen didn’t like it here, there were too many people, and no one seemed to know anything about what was happening. She’d seen lots of soldiers, and daddy told her that meant they were safe.
Vivyen certainly didn’t feel safe.
She huddled in a widened transit corridor, below a ventilation duct that sometimes blew warm air and sometimes blew cold. Her daddy talked in low voices with Noama and Kjell, and they gave her funny looks when she asked if they’d ever see Alivia again.
Miska had her head on Vivyen’s shoulders.
She was sleeping.
Vivyen needed to pee, but didn’t want to wake her sister.
To take her mind off her filling bladder, she pulled out the dog-eared storybook Alivia had given her in the press of bodies at the starport. She couldn’t read the words, they were in some old language Alivia had called Dansk, but she liked looking at the pictures.
She didn’t need to know the words. She’d heard the stories often enough that she could recite them off by heart. And sometimes when she looked at the words, it was like she did understand them, like the story wanted to be read and was unfolding itself in her mind.
The strangeness of that thought didn’t register at all.
It made sense to her and it just… was.
She flipped through the yellowed pages, looking for a picture to conjure the right words into her head.
A page with a young girl sitting at the edge of the ocean caught her eye and she nodded to herself. The girl was very beautiful, but her legs were fused together and ended in the wide tail of a fish. She liked this story; the tale of a young girl who, for the sake of true love, gives up her existence in one realm to earn a place in another.
Someone moved along the corridor. Vivyen waited for them to pass, but they stopped in front of her, blocking the light.
‘I can’t see the words,’ she said.
‘That’s a good story,’ said the person in front of her. ‘Can I read it to you?’
Vivyen looked up in surprise and nodded happily.
‘Didn’t I tell you it was going to be okay?’ said Alivia Sureka.
AFTERWORD
The Horus Heresy. There’s a clue in the name of this series as to who the main man in this story ought to be, whose name will be above the door when all the dust settles. For a while we’d all been guilty of sidelining the Warmaster. The man whose name is on every single book of this series hadn’t done much since the opening trilogy. Sure, he’d made great appearances in plenty of the stories (cutting Erebus’s face off, anyone?) but in most of them he’d been confined to the strategium or Lupercal’s Court aboard the Vengeful Spirit. He was an observer in his own story.
And that was just wrong.
Part of that comes from the fact that there’s not much written about what Horus actually does during the Heresy – he orchestrates things, he sends people to carry out his orders, he devises grand plans. And as much as he is so very good at that, it’s also not at the heart of who he is. Horus says as much during the fighting on Murder: ‘That is how I was made. If I had suspected, back at Ullanor, that the rank of Warmaster would require me to relinquish the glories of the field forever, I would not have accepted it. Someone else could have taken the honour.’
So that’s what I decided to do, to take the Warmaster away from the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit and get him back in the field. I wanted to remind everyone that Horus was the War-master, with the supreme mind of a tactician, but the skill of a killer warrior too. To see Horus make war is to bear witness to a god of battle walking the earth, an avatar of slaughter with no equal. Now, I just needed a war for him to fight, a campaign that would tempt him to meet the foe, eye-to-eye and blade-to-blade.
It had to be something personal, and in my search for a big war to involve the Sons of Horus, I came upon an old article Gav Thorpe had written in White Dwarf.
The article was about using Daemon Knights in games of Epic, and the backdrop for their introduction to the game was the war on Molech, a conflict that embodied the Heresy in microcosm: ferocious combat, hideous betrayal, the insidious touch of Chaos and slaughter on an unimaginable scale. With the setting in place, I wanted something more, something that made this particular conflict personal to Horus. That immediately suggested that it had to involve the Emperor. Not in person (steady on, we’re not there yet!) but something to do with the power at the heart of the Master of Mankind. That gave Molech extra significance, and got straight to the heart of the Warmaster too, a reason for him to risk his own life in the field.
As well as the Warmaster, Vengeful Spirit was a chance to get another favourite character back in the pages of a Horus Heresy novel. Garviel Loken had been a fan favourite since he first appeared in the pages of Horus Rising. His story was apparently concluded with the ending of Galaxy in Flames, as having a basilica
collapse on your head seems pretty final. But you can’t keep a good hero down, and when he returned in Jim’s excellent audio drama Garro: Legion of One, it was as a shadow of his former self. Loken was back, but was he the same man left buried in the ruins of Isstvan III? Can any man suffer the things that he suffered and still retain any shred of his sanity?
The idea of putting Loken and Horus back in the same room came early in one of our regular meetings, and was borne out of an intense morning’s deliberations concerning the VI Legion and their role when it came to Horus...
Thus the stories of Loken and Horus were always on a collision course, with Molech and its loathsome rulers as the backdrop. I’d written a couple of short stories as preludes to this tale – ‘The Devine Adoratrice’ from The Imperial Truth, and ‘Luna Mendax’, which appeared in The Black Library Anthology 2013/14. One prepared the ground for the Battle of Molech, sowing the seeds for Raeven Devine’s slide into corruption. The other reminded us that Loken may be back, but that his fractured mind hasn’t yet fully recovered from his time as Cerberus. Both stories hopefully whetted your appetite for the book you’ve just read. And if you’ve not had the chance to read them yet, I’d suggest hunting them down.
You may have wondered why, in a book about the Warmaster and the Sons of Horus (both ex- and current) I didn’t go into the head of the Warmaster as much as I did, say, with Perturabo in Angel Exterminatus. The answer is because I wanted Horus’s actions to show what he was thinking. Rather than have him tell the reader what he wanted to do, I figured it was better to actually have him do something that revealed his motivations. In other words, I wanted to make you guys sing for your supper, to read what was happening and fill in the blanks. After all, interacting with a book is a two-way street – you take what I write and you make it your own.
By now you’ll have realised that there’s more to the title of this book than simply the name of the Warmaster’s flagship. Yes, it’s that, as a good portion of the action takes place aboard the Vengeful Spirit, but it could also a reference a number of the characters. It could be Loken, back from the dead and hungry to expunge the stain to his Legion’s honour. It could also be Tormaggedon, a vengeful spirit if ever there was one. Or might it refer to the sad fate of Iacton Qruze?
There’s a lot going on in this book, with plenty of new characters I’d love to come back to. I want to see where Alivia Sureka goes and if things are indeed okay. I want to see the depths of madness into which Albard Devine plummets. What’s going to happen to the Mournival now that it has Tormaggedon as one of its members? Just what did the Warmaster see on the other side of that barrier and what power has he now returned with? Is he now the equal of the Emperor?
Only time will tell. And while I bet you think you know the answers, we’ve still got some killer surprises in store for you.
Graham McNeill
October 2013
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Graham McNeill has written a host of novels for Black Library, including the ever popular Ultramarines and Iron Warriors series. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller and his Time of Legends novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award. Originally hailing from Scotland, Graham now lives and works in Nottingham.
To my Mum and Dad, the best I could ever have wished for.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.
Internal art by Tiernen Trevallion.
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