Tallarn

by John French

  The atoms of his being scattered outwards in a blinding white shock of heat. The earth flashed to vapour in a sphere around where he had stood. Burning gas raced up the mouth of the tunnel, and blew from the surface, in a single, brilliant, spike of fury. The shockwave spilled outwards. The wreckage and still-burning remains of vehicles shook where they lay, and then began to tilt downwards as a gulf opened beneath them. Dust and debris poured down into the expanding crater. The machines tumbled downwards, drowning in the earth spilling after them.

  And then silence fell.

  The dust plume hung in the air, the storm already pulling apart its substance. Beneath it the wind was already dragging fresh dust over the shallow crater, a vast hand wiping it away as though it had never existed.

  On the edge of the desolation the hull of a tank lay on its side, like a fallen grave marker.

  ‘You have drawn blood amongst my warriors, emissary,’ Perturabo’s voice rose over the roar of engines, as Argonis jumped down from the Sickle Blade’s cockpit. The hangar bay was a mass of stilled activity. Rocket engines were keening, war machines hung in the cradles beneath landers: all ready to fall on Tallarn. Perturabo stood before the brushed steel bulk of a huge tank, ringed by his Iron Circle automata. His augmented bulk swelled and contracted as though in time with great slow breaths. A slit-fronted helm covered his face, and he stared at Argonis with eyes of cold, blue light.

  ‘You have concealed the truth from your Warmaster,’ said Argonis, forcing strength into his voice. Behind him he heard Sota-Nul and Prophesius come to stand behind him. The Lord of Iron’s gaze did not shift. He was still, but Argonis could feel pressure in that stillness, like a storm surge held back behind a dam.

  ‘I have done what I needed to,’ said Perturabo. ‘As I have always done.’

  Argonis shook his head.

  ‘It no longer matters, it is over, lord. You will withdraw from this place.’

  ‘You do not know what you say.’

  ‘I do.’ Argonis glanced at the waiting craft, and thought of the battle in the void he had seen around Tallarn, and of the glittering carpet of explosions on its surface.

  ‘This is not a battle fought for strategic gain. It is a battle for…’

  ‘For a weapon against betrayal.’

  ‘A weapon hidden from those you serve?’

  ‘We serve no one,’ snarled Perturabo, and the words sent ice through Argonis.

  ‘The Warmaster–’

  ‘He was my brother before he was Warmaster.’ Perturabo shook his head. ‘I do this for him, for all of us.’

  Argonis shook his head.

  ‘You will withdraw. This battle is over.’

  ‘We cannot do that.’ Argonis turned to see Forrix step from behind a Thunderhawk. The First Captain aimed a volkite charger at Argonis. With him stood a line of dull-armoured Terminators. All of their weapons pointed at him, and Argonis could feel the death promised by the black circle of each barrel. ‘We must finish this,’ said Forrix.

  ‘It is over!’ Argonis shouted.

  ‘That order is not yours to give,’ said Forrix. Argonis looked back to Perturabo.

  ‘You claim loyalty–’

  ‘You will not speak to me of loyalty. I have given loyalty many times over, loyalty counted in lives and blood.’

  ‘I speak as the Warmaster.’

  Argonis did not even see Perturabo move, but suddenly the primarch was looming above him. The deck rang with the echo of his steps.

  ‘You are not my brother,’ growled Perturabo. ‘Your voice is not his.’

  ‘No,’ said Argonis, fighting the instinct to turn away, to flee. ‘No, it is not, but I bear the Warmaster’s voice with me.’

  He stepped back, his hand pulling a crooked key from where it hung around his neck. Prophesius stepped forward, as though called. Time seemed to have become syrup. The sounds of the chamber around muted. Colours dimmed, and faded to grey. Argonis felt his skin prickle as he reached out to fit the key into the back of Prophesius’s mask.

  ‘What is… it?’ he had asked Maloghurst.

  ‘A creation of the Davinite priests. It was once an astropath. Now they call it a metatron, a conduit for voices, a caster of shadows from one place to another, no matter how distant. It is named Prophesius.’

  ‘Why is it masked?’

  Maloghurst had smiled before answering.

  The key slotted into the mask. Argonis felt his arm jerk, as though he had just touched a power cable. He could taste cinnamon and ozone. He turned the key. For an instant nothing happened. Then there was a click, then another, and another, and another, rattling together, like a chorus of unwinding springs and turning cogs. The back of the mask split apart. Prophesius’s hands were shaking, fingers gripping the air. The wax tablet dropped from its grasp, melting as it fell. Shrill cries filled Argonis’s ears as he stepped back. Forrix flinched, his aim dropping. Every living creature on the deck reeled. All except Perturabo.

  The mask fell from Prophesius’s head. Beneath there was a lump of pale flesh, and a wide, toothless mouth.

  For a second the unmasked Prophesius just stood, its mouth flapping bonelessly. Then the mouth opened wide. And opened. And opened. A single, silent word came from within. Argonis felt it ring in the back of his skull, and vibrate in his bones. Glowing ashes and snow were falling in the air, and the word went on and on until it reached somewhere that was not here, but was just a shadow away. Smoke and ash vomited from Prophesius’s mouth. The black cloud billowed, clotted, hardened, became something harder than smoke, yet thinner than light.

  An armoured figure stood before them. The pelt and head of a huge wolf covered his shoulders. His clawed hand rested on the head of the mace that lay at his foot. Argonis bent his knees without being aware of the command passing from his thoughts.

  Above him the shadow of Horus looked down at the Lord of Iron.

  ‘Perturabo,’ said Horus, and his voice was the hunger of flames and the crack of breaking ice.

  Perturabo did not move.

  ‘Brother,’ he said, his voice steady.

  ‘No,’ said Horus, and his shadow form seemed to grow, light draining into the holes that were his eyes. ‘No, not brother. I am your Warmaster, Perturabo, and I have watched from beside my emissary. I have seen what you have hidden from me.’

  ‘Horus…’ began Perturabo, but Horus’s voice cracked out like a lash of thunder.

  ‘You have deceived me. You have sought power, and kept it hidden from me. You have spent my forces for your own ends.’

  The thundercloud presence of Horus grew larger, looming high, so that it looked down like the cloud of an explosion above a dead city. Argonis felt pressure building in his skull.

  Beneath Horus’s eyes Perturabo remained, a vast figure made small, yet still unbowed.

  ‘Everything I have done has been for the Imperium we will build. Brother, you cannot be blind to serpents within us. I have seen the true face of our allies. I have felt the knife of their treachery. We must hold our own blade above their necks, or we will be unmade. It is almost in my grasp.’ He seemed to shiver. ‘Please, my brother, listen to me now. Trust me now.’

  The silence grew in the growing crackle of the storm charge. Then Horus’s shadow shook its head.

  ‘You have strayed, Perturabo,’ he raised his hand, ‘and now you will hear my will.’ The shadow of Horus seemed to shrink, to become harder. Argonis could barely keep his eyes open. He could feel the spit boiling on his tongue. He saw the shadow of talons reach towards Perturabo.

  ‘Kneel,’ said Horus.

  Iaeo fell to the waiting dark. Air rushed past her, pulling strings of blood from her body. She was dying. There was no escaping that fact. It was not even a projection, it was a fact: too much physical damage to live, and that was ignoring what the fall promised at its end. Her mind
had responded by working faster, like a candle burning bright and clear before it went out.

  And in the stopped-clock world of her fall, she heard the last strands of her creation resolve.

  She heard the order to begin a tactical withdrawal roll through Perturabo’s forces.

  She heard the Alpha Legion signal channels buzz with confusion.

  She heard the click of her last handful of seconds fall into the past.

  It had been a long journey, a long way from the beginning of the mission to this end. All the projections had ended, all the variables had resolved. All apart from one. One final strand of unfixed possibility.

  She cut away the sound of all the signals and the influx of data, until a single vox signal remained. The voice it carried rattled with static, but it was clear.

  ‘To anyone that can hear, this is Colonel Kord of the Tallarn Seventy-First. We are damaged, unable to move. Current location grid 093780 in the Hacadia Flats. Please respond.’

  No response came. Several communication arrays on both sides had caught it, but she alone heard Kord’s voice. Filters and cut-outs meant that it would only reach the ears of others if she allowed it.

  It had been the most tenuous part of the kill-projection, using Kord’s obsession, feeding it, positioning him to ensure that Hrend’s force never returned. It had worked though, and now they were a last unresolved factor.

  ‘To anyone that can hear, this is Colonel Kord of the Tallarn Seventy-First. Please respond.’

  If no one else heard the signal then War Anvil would become just another machine lost to Tallarn.

  ‘If you can hear, please respond.’

  They would survive for a while, but with Perturabo’s forces withdrawing no one would go looking for them, and the loyalists would never hear their cries for help. No one would find what they had found.

  ‘Please respond.’

  They would end in silence when their air ran out.

  ‘Please…’

  A dust storm would come and cover them over, and their machine would become their tomb.

  ‘…respond.’

  She cut the signal.

  Two seconds later her fall ended. Her last thoughts echoed in the now empty space of her mind.

  Termination complete. No errors.

  Six days after it began, the Battle of Khedive ended. It ended not with fire, but with a slow, exhausted fading of fury. Thousands of tanks pulled back, like a storm tide ebbing down a flotsam-strewn shore. Wounded Knights and Titans limped from the jungle of heaped machines to stand at the plain’s edge. Thousands died in the hours after the battle faded, their air and fuel finally running out, their crews dying in choking silence. Grey rain fell from the smoke-bloated clouds onto the fires that still burned on the wreckage-crusted plain.

  Twelve hours later the Iron Warriors began to withdraw from the surface altogether. Within three weeks Tallarn was all but silent.

  One week later General Gorn and his command cadre set foot inside the Sightless Warren.

  Four weeks later, when no trace of the Iron Warriors or their allies could be found, a signal was sent to all loyalist forces on the planet, and transmitted by astrotelepathy far beyond the system.

  Imperium victor, it read. Tallarn stands.

  Afterword

  Ten million tanks!

  In many ways it’s a phrase I wish that I had never said out loud. It was at one of the Horus Heresy Weekenders, and I was on a panel talking about the next book I was working on. I think I said something like: ‘The Battle of Tallarn was big, really big. It took a year, and there were ten million tanks involved. Ten million tanks!’

  Within the hour it was a Twitter hashtag (#TenMillionTanks!) and four years later it still crops up when people talk about Tallarn in the Horus Heresy. Ah, the power of the meme.

  The only problem was that the stories I was going to write – which make up the book you are holding – aren’t about #TenMillionTanks! and they never were going to be.

  So why say it?

  Part of the answer is to do with scale and research. I did a lot of planning for these stories. I read every scrap of information published about the Battle of Tallarn: the small asides in games written in the 1980s, all of the write-ups in every Imperial Guard Codex, and the mentions in old articles from White Dwarf. Some of those sources were contradictory, of course, but there was a core of facts.

  ‘It was the biggest armoured engagement in Imperial history.’

  ‘It lasted for close to a year.’

  ‘It was estimated that there were ten million tanks and war machines involved, and by the end there were a million wrecks on the surface.’

  Now, the largest armoured engagement in human history so far is thought to have been between about six thousand tanks and four thousand aircraft. If you add those figures together on the basis that they are both types of war machine, it gives 0.1 per cent of the forces apparently involved in the fighting on Tallarn.

  So it’s a pretty big battle. The #TenMillionTanks! fact gets that scale over really directly. It’s a staggering figure, and one that has always stuck with me.

  But why do I sometimes wish I had kept that oh-so-juicy phrase behind my teeth? Because it sets up an expectation that the stories I was going to write would be all about seas of tanks shooting the hell out of each other. And that was not at all what I intended to write.

  Having got to this afterword you probably know that, while there is a lot of tank-killing-tank action, the touted #TenMillionTanks! do not take centre stage. And that’s because what drives the stories in this book are five basic questions:

  How did the Battle of Tallarn start?

  What was it like for those fighting the war on the ground?

  Why did it become so big?

  Why did the Iron Warriors come to Tallarn?

  Why did the battle end?

  That in itself was a fairly daunting list of points to address, given that the conflict was so huge and lasted for so long. In the end I decided that the battle just wouldn’t suit a conventional single story structure – what was going on was too big, and had too many strands to put into a traditional Horus Heresy novel. Like the wider series, I wanted a feeling of there being more stories than could ever be told, and that there were truths and secrets that even those who found themselves at the heart of the action would never learn. One of the concepts that my editor, Laurie Goulding, and I used when talking about the possible structure of this book was the Battle of the Atlantic during World War II. There have been separate novels and films set in that conflict that focus, for example, on allied destroyers escorting convoys, others that are just about U-boat crews, and others still that are set a long way from the fighting, focusing on the role of code-breakers and spies. Or, to put it another way, stories about what it was like at the sharp end on both sides, and stories about all of the secrets that drove the strategic flow of the conflict. It’s one narrative, across many stories.

  The solution that I settled upon was not to write one story that tried to address everything, but several that would each focus closely on one perspective of what was going on.

  ‘Executioner’ is the story that shows the experience of the rag-tag human tank crews facing the Iron Warriors immediately after the invasion. There could be different stories about any number of other tank crews, but by focusing very closely on Tahirah’s squadron, I wanted to try and convey not just the action, but the very human aspect to the battle, facing off against legionaries purely because they have to. ‘Siren’ goes back and gives the answer to why the battle blooms out to an even larger scale after the Iron Warriors meet this slightly unexpected resistance on the surface.

  ‘Ironclad’ looks at why the Iron Warriors came to Tallarn in the first place, and why they later quit the field, leaving the loyalists victorious…

  …and ‘Witness’ is
a brief footnote about the price of that loyalist ‘victory’.

  The stories are all largely unconnected by characters (that three-headed son of the Hydra, Jalen, not withstanding), but was does connect them is that they are all stories of individual heroism, betrayal and tragedy. However, the decisions made by the characters in these stories do have wider and deeper implications, implications that they themselves are unaware of and will never live to see. Tahirah, Akil, Brel, Kulok, Lycus, Kord, Iaeo, and Hrend all reflect the idea that huge events can hinge around the actions of a few whose deeds will never be remembered, and whose lives are overlooked in the annals of history.

  Personally, I reckon that’s more interesting than ten million tanks.

  John French

  December 2016

  About the Author

  John French has written several Horus Heresy stories including the novels Praetorian of Dorn and Tallarn: Ironclad, the novellas Tallarn: Executioner and The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Templar and Warmaster. He is the author of the Ahriman series, which includes the novels Ahriman: Exile, Ahriman: Sorcerer and Ahriman: Unchanged, plus a number of related short stories collected in Ahriman: Exodus, including ‘The Dead Oracle’ and ‘Hand of Dust’. Additionally for the Warhammer 40,000 universe he has written the Space Marine Battles novella Fateweaver, plus many short stories. He lives and works in Nottingham, UK.

  For David French. Thanks for all the stories, dad.

  A Black Library Publication

  Tallarn: Executioner first published in 2013.

  Tallarn: Witness first published in 2015.

  Tallarn: Ironclad first published in 2015.

  Tallarn: Siren first published in 2016.

  This edition first published in Great Britain in 2017.

  This eBook edition published in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,