Slaves to Darkness

by John French

  ‘The truth, Zardu Layak, is the greatest force in the universe. It is not kind. It is not a shield against cruelty. It is the most dangerous thing you can hold, and it is all that matters.’

  ‘And the gods?’

  ‘The gods are a truth,’ she said. She dropped her hand from his chest and began to walk back down the ramp.

  ‘And you?’ came the call, when she was almost at the bottom. ‘I have talked to half a dozen of the Word Bearers’ hierarchy. There was no one of your name amongst the Oracles of the Ashen Saint, no one of your description or power. Yet there you were, waiting for us on Orcus…’

  She stopped at the bottom of the ramp, the smile twitching slightly wider beneath her cowl. She turned her face towards him, blind eyes seeing everything and nothing.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  She tilted her head pointedly up at the sky above.

  ‘You should not delay. Horus awaits your word that the rites are complete,’ she said. ‘And eternity has waited long enough.’

  ‘Do the gods truly want us to win?’

  She let out a breath and brushed a flake of ash from her cheek with a bloodstained finger. The ramp began to lift. The gunship began to rise into the air as the scream of its thrusters built.

  ‘Farewell, Zardu Layak,’ said Actaea, and then the sight of her was gone, and he was lifting away into the night sky.

  Argonis

  The last gunship lifted from the surface of Ullanor, rising through the columns of smoke until it cut into the void above. It flew to the ship that lay at the heart of the cloud of warships waiting above the desecrated world. A hangar bay high on the command fortress swallowed it. Argonis waited for it to set down, and then for Zardu Layak to descend to the deck. The Crimson Apostle, flanked by his twin slaves, paused at the foot of the ramp. The Eye of Horus gleamed bright on the crimson of the cloak pinned to his back. He bowed his head to Argonis, and then looked up.

  ‘The libations have been poured. The offerings burned.’

  Argonis gave a nod of acknowledgement and began his walk to the throne room. He walked alone, his staff of office marking his steps down silent corridors. Human officers and slaves abased themselves as he passed, and Legion warriors clenched their fists in salute. His steps rang through the silence until he reached the doors of the throne room. They opened for him without him having to pause.

  Horus looked up from his place on his throne. Argonis held his own gaze steady as his mind shook. The Mournival stood at the foot of the throne. All of them turned at his entering, cold eyes following him. The chained furnace of the Red Angel burned close to Abaddon. At the edge of sight, N’kari slithered and slid between the pillars, flowing from bloated beauty to wasp-thin terror like mercury. He felt his mind stretch and creak as sensations pulled at his will.

  He reached the throne, mounted the first step and knelt. Every part of him wanted to never rise, to never look at what sat there.

  ‘It is done?’ asked Horus.

  ‘Yes, sire.’

  Horus rose. Armour and shadow shook and flowed as he stepped from his throne and descended to stand in front of the great viewport behind it.

  ‘Vox-link to all ships,’ he said. His eyes were unblinking holes in the fabric of his face.

  ‘The link is active,’ said Argonis.

  ‘The hour is here,’ said Horus, his voice not raised but echoing in the ears of millions, all of them waiting for one word, the word that had followed them as a promise of glory, vengeance and slaughter.

  ‘Terra,’ said the Warmaster.

  Ekaddon

  Ekaddon stood at the centre of the training chamber, stripped to the waist, his knife in his hand. The deck around him was clean, scraped and cleansed until the blade marks shone. He felt the walls rumble with the song of engines as the great ship pushed through the tides of the warp.

  A low sound made him freeze for a second.

  He smiled. He checked the binding on the medallion of the Cathartidae. It was firm. The stone disc felt warm against his skin. He closed his eyes and flicked the knife from hand to hand. The chamber and shadows were still.

  ‘You are losing your touch,’ he said, opening his eyes and smiling into the dark. No answer came. ‘Unless, of course, you wanted me to realise you were here.’

  A figure stepped into the half-light. He was a legionary, but like Ekaddon he had shed his power armour. A tunic of black carbon fibre-weave covered his torso and hung to his knees. Tattoos of birds spread down his exposed arms.

  ‘Greetings, lord equerry,’ said Ekaddon, inclining his head.

  ‘Kalus,’ said Argonis, his gaze steady.

  Ekaddon flicked the knife into the air again, caught it, grinned.

  ‘The Unscarred replaces the Twisted… I suppose it makes a sort of sense.’

  Argonis walked closer, his hands empty and by his sides.

  ‘The Warmaster–’

  ‘Honours and appreciates all you did.’

  ‘But others do not.’

  Argonis shook his head.

  ‘Kibre, and Abaddon,’ breathed Ekaddon.

  ‘There are limits to forgiveness.’

  ‘They can be dealt with though, surely. Pride healed, feathers smoothed… A test for your diplomacy and new authority.’

  ‘The unity of the Legion must be maintained.’

  Ekaddon looked at his brother, the grin still in place but his eyes holding sorrow.

  ‘Do you miss it? Cthonia I mean, the old times.’

  ‘We were children,’ said Argonis, stopping three paces from Ekaddon.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ekaddon, grinning wider. ‘Murderous children.’

  Argonis smiled, the expression cracking the smooth skin of his face. In his eyes, the light of fires in remembered tunnels flared.

  ‘Would you?’ he had asked, and his blood brother had grinned. ‘If you were given my death coin, would you do it?’

  ‘No,’ he said and aimed a light punch at Argonis’ shoulder. ‘Might try, though, just to see.’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘If I could do it, if you are really that sharp.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Well, now I know, don’t I.’

  And their laugher cut the shadows.

  In the dark of the duelling chamber at the heart of the Vengeful Spirit, Argonis took the mirror coin from a pouch at his waist and tossed it into the centre of the circle. It fell with a chime of silver, its blank face pale and bright against the scarred stone. Ekaddon looked at it and then up at Argonis.

  ‘Shall we?’ he said.

  Argonis nodded and stepped forwards.

  Epilogue

  War’s End

  Red touched the edge of the sky as he walked along the triumphal highway. It was still deserted, but activity stirred in the camps that lined its margins. The first of the transport craft were rising into the air to make way for their kin. Soldiers mustered in small groups for the first of many inspections. Engines turned over in the bellies of tanks and shouted orders disturbed the whisper of the dust wind. Horus Lupercal watched the world wake from beneath his falsehood and walked on, passing his own guards, entering the pavilion made of a dozen drop-ships. None saw him; he passed like a ghost.

  ‘Did you find enlightenment, lord?’ Maloghurst was waiting in the planning chamber, bent over layers of plans and stacks of data-slates. He did not look up.

  ‘After a fashion,’ said Horus as he pulled the falsehood off.

  ‘This is going to be a lot of trouble,’ said Maloghurst, frowning over a stream of data. ‘The marshalling of all the might of mankind… I can’t help but feel that apart from the giddy sense of power, the chief experience is going to be a feeling that there is always something that I am not seeing.’

  ‘You presume that I am going to accept, Mal.’
<
br />   Maloghurst looked up, meeting his primarch’s gaze for a second.

  ‘You will, lord.’

  Horus gave a half-smile.

  ‘So I am told.’

  ‘The other choices are no choice at all.’

  ‘Is that so, Mal?’ he said, holding his gaze steady on his equerry. Maloghurst shrugged.

  ‘Given everything, given your nature, yes.’ Maloghurst made his best attempt at a smile of his own. ‘That is unless you would rather leave the future to someone else.’

  ‘It had crossed my mind…’

  ‘Only as the moon must cross the sky. You know you will do this, must do this. The Emperor knows. You just have to…’

  ‘What, Mal? What must I do?’

  ‘Accept it, lord.’

  Horus formed a reply, then pulled it back from his tongue. He drew a breath, tasting every layer of scent and chemical in the planning chamber. Then, editing his senses down with an act of will to something that a human might recognise, he held himself in that limited circle of knowledge and feeling.

  ‘All right,’ he said, at last. ‘All right, then we had best get this started, right, Mal?’

  Maloghurst looked up, paused and held Horus’ gaze.

  ‘Indeed.’

  Horus smiled and let his mind expand to hear the world waking to a day that would see him Warmaster.

  ‘Let us begin,’ he said.

  Afterword

  What is Chaos?

  This question is at the heart of the book you hold in your hands. On the face of it, the answer is quite simple. Chaos is the dark force that exists in the warp. This force is exemplified by the four Dark Gods of Chaos: Khorne, Tzeentch, Nurgle and Slaanesh. The gods want to crush reality and they offer power to those mortals who serve them. This power most often comes in the form of tentacles, supernatural abilities, and a sudden love of grisly trophies and eight-pointed stars. So far, so familiar, yes? And from a certain angle all of that is manifestly true, but it’s not the whole truth. The truth is far, far worse, and that truth is what I wanted to show in Slaves to Darkness.

  Chaos is elemental. The forces of the warp are regarded as gods, their servants as daemons, and their powers as sorcery. That is how mortals who know of the warp talk about Chaos, but that is a rationalisation of something much bigger and more terrifying. The forces of Chaos are not gods, in that they are not like people. They have sentience, a strange nightmare sentience patched together from the emotions of mortal races, but they are closer in nature to a cyclone than they are to a person. They are forces of eternal nature; raw and lethal, and wildly destructive. This is not because they choose to be, or because they enjoy it, any more than a flood chooses to sweep away a town, or a tornado flips over cars for kicks. They do what they do because that is what they are. They can be no other way. These powers oppose and antagonise each other like the poles of magnets. Despair and rot claw at the desire for perfection and endless pleasure, war sweeps away subtle power, and so on.

  What does that have to do with the Horus Heresy and this book? It is important because it is the reason that the Traitors aren’t made stronger by falling to Chaos. They are made weaker. They are made slaves who can no longer choose their own path. Chaos pulls them apart, divides them, consumes them and sets Horus’ forces against each other. It does not do this because it is a winning strategy, far from it; it does this because it can’t help it. The great powers in the warp, the four that are called gods, can come together and apply their power to a single end, but this can only be temporary. As soon as they align they begin to split. And because they are elemental forces they do this messily, and with all the care of an earthquake.

  But why don’t Horus and his followers simply choose not to be swayed by these forces? Why don’t they just take the good bits – the special powers – but stay focused and united in their goals? Because once Chaos has its claws in them, they have no choice. Once an individual has let Chaos take hold of them, their thoughts and emotions begin to resonate and amplify in harmony with the great powers. Other ways of seeing events wither in their perception. The manifest powers of Chaos become a release that can only be accessed by falling deeper into their embrace. Characters fall to Chaos, but they spiral as they fall. They try to escape, but their every choice now only takes them deeper. There is no way out for Horus and those that follow him, they are slaves and doomed through their own choices to fall apart and on each other with murder and treachery.

  Once Chaos has hold of a mortal it enables the emotions that drove it into its arms, and feeds them in turn, so that they grow all-consuming and circular. Resentment becomes rage, becomes violence. Pride becomes arrogance. Knowledge becomes blindness to truth. And even if the soul that has fallen fights their fate, they still fall. To fall to Chaos is not to bow to the Chaos Gods, in fact it does not require that you even know that the Dark Gods exist. To rephrase the words hissed by the daemon Samos in the first Horus Heresy novel, Horus Rising: ‘Chaos all around you… It is the person beside you… It is you…’ The elemental power of the Chaos gods comes from the emotions of all sentient beings. Khorne does not exist because people worship it as a god of blood and war; Khorne exists because sentient creatures feel anger and rage, and want to destroy and kill and see their enemies broken. It does not matter to Tzeentch if a mortal who plots for power or hungers for knowledge does so in its name. The emotion and thought is enough to keep the cyclone turning.

  That is what Chaos is, it is every weakness given power and set loose against itself without beginning and without end. That is the path that Horus, Lorgar and the first heretics set themselves on when they embraced Chaos. That is, if you like, the point of this book – to show that Horus and those that led him and followed him into darkness have become slaves to forces that they cannot control, bound by the chains of their own natures.

  John French,

  Nottingham,

  2018

  About the Author

  John French has written several Horus Heresy stories including the novels Praetorian of Dorn and Tallarn, 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, the audio dramas Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies, Agent of the Throne: Truth and Dreams, the Ahriman series and many short stories.

  An extract from Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris.

  The door shivered, its onyx panels already cracked and its carved jambs cracking. A storm blew through it, a roar of gold and white, as elemental as the summer gales on the Altak. A window pane shattered, sending teardrops of glass bouncing.

  Courtiers scattered, hitching up heavy brocade robes and tottering like birds. A woman screamed, while a man stumbled and scrabbled on all fours towards the stairwell.

  The storm paid them no heed. He strode through the crowd, eyes bright with a vital anger, towering over even the greatest and making them appear insignificant. In his wake came two armoured giants, clad in ivory and jasper, their heavy tread resounding on hard floors. All three titans glittered under the wheeling light of disturbed suspensors that set their scabbards and blade-pommels flashing.

  ‘His neck,’ said the Khagan of Chogoris, the Great Khan of the Fifth Legion Astartes, his long black hair flying loose. ‘If He does not learn to bend it, one day it will break.’

  The primarch swept through the antechambers of the Imperial Palace, his cloak hem snapping like a whip about his heels. With him came the twin masters of his young army, Hasik and Giyahun, their bronze faces impassive.

  Gold pillars soared up around them, chased and fluted and spiralled, inlaid with glass and studded with pearls. Marble statuary stood in blank isolation amid the mirrors and the porcelain, barred by the warm light of the Terran dawn.

  A man in the robes of the Senatorum Imperialis emerged at the far end of the long gallery, took one loo
k at the rampaging primarch, then darted out again. Other courtiers shrank back, bowing and stammering.

  ‘The mind – unequalled,’ the Khan growled, swinging into another hall. His closed fist punched out at a bulbous vase, and it shattered into a rain of echoing fragments. ‘But the neck. That is the weakness. That is the flaw.’

  High windows passed by, leaded and mullioned, each offering glimpses of the immensity beyond – parapets rearing above parapets, glare-white from the mountain air. The Palace was a never-ending project, they said, a billion techwrights working on it daily to render the peaks into cathedrals of the mind and the soul, raising up monuments to Unity that would endure for eternity. No guns marred the ramparts in those days, only pennants and propaganda, for war had left Terran skies a lifetime ago and now burned its way across the vaults of a deeper heaven.

  ‘He gazes on the infinite,’ the Khan spat, ‘but we are body, blood and bone.’

  His retinue made no reply. They did not as much as glance at the finery around them; their eyes were fixed forwards, their sun-darkened faces held rigid. Both carried a long scar on their cheeks, zigzagged in ritual imitation of lightning, the kindler-destroyer of the borderless grass. Both understood that they were not being addressed. This was their master in his anger, unleashing the torrent as a mountain unleashes its storms.

  ‘Scorn not your tools, say the sages,’ the Khan said. ‘Scorn not the blade that cuts, lest it open your own veins.’

  Another hall beckoned, another chamber within that cavernous interior, just as ornate, just as immaculate. Jewelled incense-drones swerved out of the primarch’s path, whining as their grav-plates struggled to gain loft.

  The Khan halted at last. More than thirty figures barred the way ahead. Some were armoured as he was, arrayed in a variety of Crusade-pattern war-plate. Others wore the uniforms of the Imperial Army – stiff jerkins, high collars, flak-weave half cloaks. A scattering of them were wrapped in the long robes of officials.