Slaves to Darkness

by John French

  ‘We can clear the system before the Ultramarines reach the planet if we pull back into orbit now,’ said Forrix. ‘What is your will, lord?’

  Perturabo faces the wrath of Angron

  Part Three

  The Eve of All that Must Be

  Sixteen

  Maloghurst

  The night air of Ullanor stirred Horus’ cloak at his back. The flapping of the fabric filled the silence. Maloghurst could smell the fuel of the landing craft mixing with the rock dust. It felt almost real, almost like it had on the eve of the triumph all those years before. Almost.

  ‘Ullanor…’ said Maloghurst. ‘You told us to gather at Ullanor, and here we are in your fever dreams – always Ullanor. Why, sire?’

  ‘I think you can guess, Mal.’

  ‘Because this is where you became Warmaster.’

  Horus shook his head and turned away, resting his hands on the balustrade. He looked down at the dark beneath which the parade highway ran. The muscles around his eyes twitched.

  ‘Because this was the last time I saw my father – the last time I was a son and a brother. The last time I was not the Warmaster. I had a choice then. Maybe the only time I was given a choice not to become what I am.’

  Maloghurst drew a breath that tasted real.

  ‘He made His choice too, sire,’ he said softly. ‘The Emperor chose to deceive, to keep the truth to Himself, to abandon us once we were no longer the angels His heaven needed. What choice did you have?’

  ‘Choices are everything – history is made by choices…’ Horus smiled as he spoke. ‘Just not the ones we think.’

  ‘You will face Him. You will slay Him, and you will remake the Imperium. That is the future you chose for yourself. For all of us.’

  ‘They lied, Mal,’ said Horus softly.

  ‘The Emperor–’

  ‘The Emperor, Malcador, Erebus, the gods, all of them and more.’ He paused. ‘And I ate the lies. In the face of one lie revealed, I just turned to another and followed that lie until it led me in a circle.’

  ‘You went beyond, sire. On Molech, you became–’

  ‘That is the trouble with power. The more of it you have, the more using it becomes everything. A thousand steps, Mal, ten times ten thousand steps taken from past to present. Each one taken so that the next would follow, but without ever looking back. Without ever looking at whence you came.’

  Horus turned from the view, and whether it had been hidden before or whether it only existed now, Maloghurst saw the blood that covered the Warmaster’s white armour. Horus’ eyes were hollow, fixed on something beyond what could be seen. His right hand was clamped over a wide wound in his side. Deep crimson pulsed between his fingers.

  ‘It was the wound, I think,’ said Horus. ‘Russ’ bite. I felt it sink deep. I saw his face as the blow landed. In that moment, just for a moment, everything fell away. I could see, Mal. I could see… every­thing. I could see so much that blindness is all that it has left me. There is no future for our Legion but shame – no honour to be given, because I burned it in this war. No matter what my father did, no matter what lies He told us, I am the hand of my own fate, and I always have been.’

  On the edge of the horizon the sun began to rise. The wind was growing stronger. Banners snapped on their poles. Maloghurst thought he felt the ground shake. He could smell fire and ash.

  ‘I have thrown it to the flames, Mal.’ Horus’ face was a mask of pain over a pit of rage. His image blurred as he spoke. ‘There is nothing but ruin left of the dream, and nothing but ashes left of hope. And I have done this. I have wielded the storm and sown the future with corpses. And I can hear them…’ He raised his hand from the wound at his side. It was red. ‘And they are laughing.’

  ‘So you fight the powers of the warp as well as your father.’

  ‘I defied one tyrant who would be a god,’ said Horus. His teeth were clenched, between bloody lips. Behind him the sun was roaring, a burning orb hoisted into a sky that was blinding white. ‘I will not be the slave of false gods!’

  Maloghurst felt the wind tug at him. He looked down at his hands. Ash and embers peeled from them. The stone of the balcony was unravelling into smoke.

  ‘It is too late, sire,’ he called. Far away he could feel the slow beats of his hearts as they poured his life away faster than his flesh could heal. ‘You cannot do this,’ he shouted. ‘You know that. You know it better than I. This part of you is killing the rest of what you are. You must submit. If you do not then you will be nothing.’

  ‘I am the Warmaster. I will not be a–’

  ‘Slave? But you said you made a choice, sire, that all that has happened is by your hand. Tell me what in your slavery let you do such things?’

  ‘I–’

  ‘You made your choice, sire. You must submit to it! You must be the Warmaster, no matter the cost. I will not let you be anything less.’

  Maloghurst drew the knife. It was not real. It, like everything he saw, was just a shape given to something that only the soul understood. He felt the weight of the knife in his hand, felt the cold of its edge as it touched the false air. At the foot of the throne, a world away, his hearts stopped.

  The image of Horus opened his blood-filled mouth to speak.

  Maloghurst rammed the knife into the open wound in Horus’ side. The image of Horus froze. Maloghurst felt the fire crawling through him, felt the talons pull the last echo of his soul into the great ocean of fire. Horus looked at him with hollow eyes, blood pouring from his lips as flames crawled over his face and the wind began to scatter them both to ash.

  ‘Lupercal is no more,’ rasped Maloghurst with the last of his life. ‘Horus rises.’

  Layak

  Layak sat alone and stared at his mask. It sat on its plinth, the ruby eyes running down its cheeks staring back at him. Its fangs grinned mirthlessly. Silence wrapped them both. The Trisagion was running the storm tide’s edge, its engines at full burn, daemons running before it as its heralds. They needed to reach Ullanor before Horus declared the muster complete. So Lorgar and the Legion’s priests had poured blood and prayers into the Sea of Souls, and called the children of the gods to give them swift passage. The ships of the Emperor’s Children had found them, one by one, as they rode the warp, drawn by the beacon of Fulgrim’s call. It should have been impossible for ships to locate each other in the warp, but if the gods willed it then anything was possible.

  If the gods willed it…

  And what did they will?

  The mask grinned back in silence.

  ‘You spoke before, but why not now?’

  He shook his head, breaking his vigil for the first time in four hours. The chamber was dark, his blind slaves banished from his presence. Only Kulnar and Hebek remained, flanking the doors, silent, swathed in red. He had come here leaving the rest of the Word Bearers to their sacrifices and grand rituals.

  They had reached Orcus, rot and black fog spreading through the webway in their wake. Nothing had tried to stop them. It was as though the alien tunnels had been cut off and left to wither like a diseased limb. That journey had passed without words, just the pull of Fulgrim’s bindings tugging Layak’s will and the turn of his thoughts. The memory of the ghost image that had attacked him during their first journey rose and walked with him, grey clad, trailing ashes as it walked at his side. It was not real, it never had been real, but what it had said to him had been true. Layak knew that with a certainty. He remembered the truth.

  ‘I learnt the signs of poisoned knowledge,’ said his thoughts. ‘I saw the masks that mankind pulls over its fears. I learnt that all gods are lies, that power comes from purity. I was there when Terra still smouldered with war and disunity. I walked the aisles of burning temples and lit the fires of condemned cities. I served the Emperor, and I walked the same battlefields as Him. I saw Him, radiant and righteous,
and knew that He was the truth and the light – no god but a power beyond gods, real and terrible and true.’

  So many pyres. So many ashes…

  ‘Why do you shiver, mighty sorcerer? What could make your soul turn to ice? The flames of truth would once have been my gift to you. But you are a creature, a slave to darkness and deserve no such pity, as you should remember…

  The grey warrior smiled in Layak’s memory, the expression cold and fleeting.

  ‘I was a Herald of Truth before Lorgar came from the dust-world of Colchis. It was decades before I saw the primarch. I had been fighting among the Halo Stars, in the grand and hungering abyss of that lost expanse. Even then I did not see the poison of faith that had seeped into our Legion. That came later. The highest and purest enemies of delusion fallen to belief in phantasms.’

  ‘What is the truth?’ he said aloud.

  ‘Revelation cannot be demanded,’ said Actaea from behind him.

  The muscles along his back twitched, but he did not rise nor break his gaze from the mask.

  ‘How did you get in here?’ he asked, feeling the threads of his thoughts ravel back into the dark.

  ‘I walked,’ she said, and he heard the soft tread of her feet on the deck as she drew nearer. ‘Kulnar, Hebek and I have an understanding.’

  ‘You should die for such a transgression,’ he said, hearing the lack of conviction in his voice.

  ‘Then kill me.’

  She came closer, the rustle of red velvet filling his ears. He suppressed an instinct to reach for the mask, to hide his face and thoughts.

  ‘Spare yourself the effort,’ said Actaea, coming into view. ‘I am blind, remember?’ Her crimson robes were clean of blood, and she had pulled the heavy cowl up so that only her mouth and chin showed. She was smiling, the lips pressed into an enigmatic line.

  She looked down at him and then at the mask. Slowly she stepped towards it and raised a hand as though to feel its shape.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Layak. Her hand stopped and then folded back into her robe.

  ‘My faith is false,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Do you believe in the gods?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Do you believe that only under the gods can mankind survive?’

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded.

  ‘Then that is true.’

  He was silent for a second.

  ‘I never chose that belief,’ he said at last. ‘They did not convert me, they did not persuade me or show me the light. They hacked out what I was, who I was. They took the belief that I had and tore it from me. I was no convert who saw the light, I was an apostate.’

  Actaea raised her chin, tilted her head and then nodded.

  ‘They made you, gave you a name, gave you faith and ultimately power. Then they took the memory of what you had been before. The old godless iconoclast was left in the ashes of the fire that you walked from reborn.’ She shook her head twice slowly. ‘All a long time ago.’

  ‘Does time change anything?’

  ‘Everything,’ she replied.

  Layak felt the ship tremble beneath him as it cut through a cord of warp current. He did not reply.

  ‘Lorgar has placed sentries outside your chamber, you know,’ said Actaea after a moment.

  He nodded, then realised that the gesture was pointless.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am a weapon. I have performed one of the tasks that he intended me for. I hold the shackles of an exalted prince of the pantheon. One does not leave such a thing unguarded.’

  ‘If you have accepted that then why do you ask the gods for guidance?’

  ‘I was denied the truth. I was used,’ he said. ‘And I… I can feel it… eating me. All I can hear now are echoes. The echoes of who I was, the echoes of the Prince of Pleasure’s being. Those are the only two things left to me – the warrior who believed that gods were an abomination, and the laughter of an immortal.’

  ‘That is the consequence of what you are and what has been done to you, Zardu Layak. Your faith is a creation, your purpose as an instrument of your master. In time you will remember less and less – the past will be eaten by the power of the creatures you have chained. That is an inescapable fate… But now, for a brief moment, you are left with one thing that means that you are not a slave. You have a choice.’

  He stared at the mask for a long moment.

  ‘I do not wish to be a slave, but I do not see any choice,’ he said, then turned his head to look at Actaea.

  The space behind him was empty. Still air and half-dark extended away to where Hebek and Kulnar stood unmoving beside the sealed door.

  Argonis

  The Ultramarines fleet unfolded through the void as it came. It had exited the warp in tight order, each ship slotted close to its sisters so that the whole seemed a narrow spear reaching from nowhere into the dark. Ships that were out of place moved swiftly back into position as they entered real space. And they did not slow down. Engines breathing blue-and-yellow flame in their wake, they thrust towards Deluge. Layer by layer the ships peeled out from the narrow formation, like the petals of a flower opening under the sun. Void shields crackled over ash-grey hulls and gilded gun towers. Warships of the Five Hundred Worlds rode with them: the Vengeance Eternal, renamed and remade from the wreck of the Bellicosia left drifting in the orbits of Calth; the Aesoclus, war galleon of the Indumabia Free Cohorts; and the flotilla of the Casandra Belt Princes. Soldiers and machines of war filled their hulls, and fire the breeches of their guns.

  Perturabo’s fleet locked closer into orbit. In their bellies, lexmechanics and cohorts of servitors began to calculate firing patterns. Beside them, the ships of the World Eaters drifted in scattered formations.

  The first shot reached across the void between the two fleets. It was a nova shell cluster, loosed from the cannon-barge Seneca. Made in times long before the rise of the Emperor, she was a weapon of a lost age, her power dwindling as the means to repair and maintain her faded from knowledge. These battles of vengeance would be her last. The cluster of three macro rounds struck the World Eaters cruiser Red Hound. Each nova shell in the cluster was the size of a hab-block, each packed with plasma and explosives. The first detonation ripped the Red Hound’s hull open and burned the air in its outer decks. The next set of warheads bored through the open wounds in its hull before exploding in its heart. The blast of the ship’s reactor combined with the shell’s payload set a second sun burning in the sky above Deluge.

  Argonis flinched as the flare of light reached his eyes an instant before his helm display dimmed to compensate, the tactical data from the fleet swallowed by the destruction wrought in orbit. His sight cleared, and he saw that the withered shadow of Angron was smiling a broken smile from where he lay on the ground at Perturabo’s feet.

  ‘You will die here,’ said Angron as another flare of light split the dome of the sky above. ‘You will die with us.’

  ‘No we will not,’ said Perturabo. ‘I refuse to let that come into being.’ He turned the torn face of his helm to the sky. ‘I refuse!’ he called. Argonis had never heard the Lord of Iron shout. The cries of other primarchs had echoed across the battlefields he had fought over, but Perturabo was a warrior of cold slaughter, his anger the silent fall of an axe. But now, he roared. There was rage in that cry, and bitterness, and defiance.

  The war-light in orbit was a stuttering corona now as the Ultramarines hurled shots at the Iron Warriors.

  ‘This is how it ends,’ said Angron, rising from the ground. Red fire flowed under his cracked skin. Withered limbs shuddered with swelling muscle. The wings at his back creaked as smoke sketched skin between the charred bones. ‘This is how it must end.’

  The World Eaters were streaming away from the hill now, bellowing at the sky, axes raised to the spreading wash of flame as the fleets closed.

  ‘Th
e fleet needs to reconfigure,’ shouted Forrix. ‘They are approaching range to launch a ground assault wave. If we are going to resist that or evacuate, we need to act now.’

  Perturabo looked at Forrix and then Argonis and then Volk. A stillness had fallen across the top of the hill, as though a circle had been drawn across which the clamour of shouts and war could not cross.

  Angron was on his feet, grown again to a looming figure of red flesh and ragged darkness. He shook where he stood, etheric muscles clenching, rage fuming from him in waves. He did not move, an inhuman moment of control holding him in place as he raised his axe and pointed it at Perturabo.

  ‘You cannot outrun this,’ he said, the words chewed from the furnace of his mouth, his voice red fire between burning teeth. ‘Here we will all run red, your blood and mine. Under the flesh, every face is a skull.’

  Perturabo was not looking at Angron but at Volk, at the bloated walking weapon that had been his loyal son.

  ‘Angron,’ he said, his voice low. Angron seemed to flinch, but Perturabo turned and raised his hammer, not in threat or challenge but in salute. ‘I speak to the warrior who was my brother in life. You cannot die. You are cursed to the eternal. You may stand here and watch your sons and mine fall, but you will not be released. You will never be released. Not if a river of blood flows.’

  ‘It matters not, so long as it flows!’ roared Angron. There was a heartbeat in time, a moment between the stillness of Angron and the blur of movement. Argonis could not see it, but he felt it like a breath being snatched from behind his teeth.

  ‘You have a choice,’ said Perturabo into the moment. Angron froze. ‘I shall stand with you, Angron. We were only brothers by blood, but here and now, I shall stand with you if you choose. We shall fight, and I shall fall as you wished to fall before our father denied you the death you craved.’

  Perturabo stepped forwards.

  ‘It is the last choice you will have, Angron – the last choice you may ever have. You can condemn me, my sons and yours to die here, or you can come with me and face our father.’