False Gods whh-2

by Graham McNeill

  Hektor Varvarus stood at the crest of the breach and surveyed the scene of carnage, his horrified expression easy to read even from a distance. Loken felt his resentment towards Varvarus swell as he thought, this is what we were created for, what else did you expect!

  'Looks like their leaders are here to surrender to Varvarus,' said Torgaddon, pointing to a long column of beaten men and women marching from the smoking rains of the inner keep, red and silver banners carried before them. A hundred warriors in battered plate armour marched with them, their long barrelled weapons shouldered and pointed at the ground.

  Robed magos and helmeted officers led the column, their faces downcast and resigned to their capitulation. With the storm of the esplanade, the citadel was lost and the leaders of the Brotherhood knew it.

  'Come on,' said Loken. 'This is history. Since there are no remembrancers here, we might as well be part of this.'

  'Yes,' agreed Torgaddon, pushing himself to his feet. The two captains drew parallel with the column of beaten Brotherhood warriors, and soon every one of the Sons of Horus who had survived the escalade surrounded them.

  Loken watched Varvarus climb down the rearward slope of the breach and make his way towards the leaders of the Auretian Technocracy. He bowed formally and said, 'My name is Lord Commander Hektor Varvarus, commander of the Emperor's armies in the 63rd Expedition. To whom do I have the honour of addressing?'

  An elderly warrior in gold plate armour stepped from the ranks of men, his black and silver heraldry carried on a personal banner pole by a young lad of no more than sixteen years.

  'I am Ephraim Guardia,' he said, 'Senior Preceptor of the Brotherhood Chapter Command and Castellan of the Iron Citadel.'

  Loken could see the tension on Guardia's face, and knew that it was taking the commander all his self-control to remain calm in the face of the massacre he had just witnessed.

  'Tell me,' said Guardia. 'Is this how all wars are waged in your Imperium?'

  'War is a harsh master, senior preceptor,' answered Varvarus. 'Blood is spilled and lives are lost. I feel the sorrow of your losses, but excess of grief for the dead is madness. It is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.'

  'Spoken like a tyrant and a killer,' snarled Guardia, and Varvarus bristled with anger at his defeated foe's lack of etiquette.

  'Given time, you will see that war is not what the Imperium stands for,' promised Varvarus. 'The Emperor's Great Crusade is designed to bring reason and illumination to the lost strands of mankind. I promise you that this… unpleasantness will soon be forgotten as we go forward into a new age of peace.'

  Guardia shook his head and reached into a pouch at his side. 'I think you are wrong, but you have beaten us and my opinion means nothing any more.'

  He unrolled a sheet of parchment and said, 'I shall read our declaration to you, Varvarus. All my officers have signed it and it will stand as a testament to our attempts to defy you.'

  Clearing his throat, Guardia began to read.

  'We fought your treacherous Warmaster to preserve our way of life and to resist the yoke of Imperial rule. It was, in truth, not for glory, nor riches, nor for honour that we fought, but for freedom, which no honest man could ever wish to give up. However, the greatest of our warriors cannot stand before the savagery of your war, and rather than see our culture exterminated, we surrender this citadel and our worlds to you. May you rale in peace more kindly than you make war.'

  Before Varvarus could react to the senior preceptor's declaration, the rubble behind him shifted and groaned, cracks splitting the rock and metal as something vast and terrible heaved upwards from beneath the ground.

  At first Loken thought that it was the second seismic charge he had feared, but then he saw that these tremors were far more localised. Janizars scattered, and men shouted in alarm as more debris clattered from the breach. Loken gripped the hilt of his sword as he saw many of the Brotherhood warriors reach for their weapons.

  Then the breach exploded with a grinding crack of ruptured stone, and something immense and red erupted from the ground with a bestial roar of hate and bloodlust. Soldiers fell away from the red giant, hurled aside by the violence of his sudden appearance.

  Angron towered over them, bloody and enraged, and Loken marvelled that he could still be alive after thousands of tonnes of rock had engulfed him. But Angron was a primarch and what - save for an anathame - could lay one such as him low?

  'Blood for Horus!' shouted Angron and leapt from the breach.

  The primarch landed with a thunderous impact that split the stone beneath him, his chain-glaive sweeping out and cleaving the entire front rank of Brotherhood warriors to bloody rain. Ephraim Guardia died in the first seconds of Angron's attack, his body cloven through the chest with a single blow.

  Angron howled in battle lust as he hacked his way through the Brotherhood with great, disembowelling sweeps of his monstrous, roaring weapon. The madness of his slaughter was terrifying, but the warriors of the Brotherhood were not about to die without a fight.

  Loken shouted, 'No! Stop!' but it was already too late. The remainder of the Brotherhood shouldered their weapons and began firing on the Sons of Horus and the rampaging primarch.

  'Open fire!' shouted Loken, knowing he had no choice.

  Gunfire tore through the ranks of the Brotherhood, the point-blank firefight a lethal firestorm of explosive bolter rounds. The noise was deafening and horrifyingly brief as the Brotherhood were mercilessly gunned down by the Astartes or hacked apart by Angron.

  Within seconds, it was over and the last remnants of the Brotherhood were no more.

  Desperate cries for medics sounded from the command units of the Janizars, and Loken saw a group of bloody soldiers on their knees around a fallen officer, his cream greatcoat drenched in blood. The gold of his medals gleamed in the cold midday light and as one of the kneeling soldiers shifted position, Loken realised the identity of the fallen man.

  Hektor Varvarus lay in a spreading pool of blood, and even from a distance, Loken could see that there would be no saving him. The man's body had been ripped open from the inside, the gleaming ends of splintered ribs jutting from his chest where it was clear a bolter round had detonated within him.

  Loken wept to see this fragile peace broken, and dropped his sword in disgust at what had happened and at what he had been forced to do. With Angron's senseless attack, the lives of his warriors had been threatened, and he'd had no other choice but to order the attack.

  Still, he regretted it.

  The Brotherhood had been honourable foes and the Sons of Horus had butchered them like cattle. Angron stood in the midst of the carnage, his glaive spraying the warriors nearest him with spatters of blood from the roaring chainblade.

  The Sons of Horus cheered in praise of the World Eaters' primarch, but Loken felt soul sick at such a barbaric sight.

  'That was no way for warriors to die,' said Torgaddon. 'Their deaths shame us all.'

  Loken didn't answer. He couldn't.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Illumination

  With the fall of the Iron Citadel, the war on Aureus was over. The Brotherhood was destroyed as a fighting force and though there were still pockets of resistance to be mopped up, the fighting was as good as over. Casualties on both sides had been high, most especially in the Army units of the Expedition. Hektor Varvams was brought back to the fleet with due reverence and his body returned to space in a ceremony attended by the highest-ranking officers of the Expeditions.

  The Warmaster himself spoke the lord commander's eulogy, the passion and depths of his sorrow plain to see.

  'Heroism is not only in the man, but in the occasion,' the Warmaster had said of Lord Commander Varvarus. 'It is only when we look now and see his success that men will say that it was good fortune. It was not. We lost thousands of our best warriors that day and I feel the loss of every one. Hektor Varvarus was a leader who knew that to march with the gods, one must wait until he hears their footst
eps sounding through events, and then leap up and grasp the hem of their robes.

  Varvarus is gone from us, but he would not want us to pause in mourning, for history is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast to it is to be swept aside and that, my friends, will never happen. Not while I am Warmaster. Those men who fought and bled with Varvarus shall have this world to stand sentinel over, so that his sacrifice will never be forgotten.'

  Other speakers had said their farewells to the lord commander, but none with the Warmaster's eloquence. True to his word, Horus ensured that Army units that had been loyal to Varvarus were appointed to minister the worlds he had died to make compliant.

  A new Imperial commander was installed, and the martial power of the fleet began the time-consuming process of regrouping in preparation for the next stage of the Crusade.

  Karkasy's billet stank of ink and printing fumes, the crude, mechanical bulk printer working overtime to print enough copies of the latest edition of The Truth is All We Have. Though his output had been less prolific of late, the Bondsman number 7 box was nearly empty. Ignace Karkasy remembered wondering, a lifetime ago it seemed, whether or not the lifespan of his creativity could be measured in the quantity of paper he had left to fill. Such thoughts seemed meaningless, given the powerful desire to write that was upon him these days.

  He sat on the edge of his cot bed, the last remaining place for him to sit, penning the latest scurrilous piece of verse for his pamphlet and humming contentedly to himself. Papers filled the billet, strewn across the floor, tacked upon the walls or piled on any surface flat enough to hold them. Scribbled notes, abandoned odes and half-finished poems filled the space, but such was the fecundity of his muse that he didn't expect to exhaust it any time soon.

  He'd heard that the war with the Auretians was over, the final citadel having fallen to the Sons of Horus a couple of days ago in what the ship scuttlebutt was already calling the White Mountains Massacre. He didn't yet know the full story, but several sources he'd cultivated over the ten months of the war would surely garner him some juicy titbits.

  He heard a curt knock on his door-shutter and shouted, 'Come in!'

  Karkasy kept on writing as the shutter opened, too focused on his words to waste a single second of his time.

  'Yes?' he said, 'What can I do for you?'

  No answer was forthcoming, so Karkasy looked up in irritation to see an armoured warrior standing mutely before him. At first, Karkasy felt a thrill of panic, seeing the man's longsword and the hard, metallic gleam of a bolstered pistol, but he relaxed as he saw that the man was Petronella Vivar's bodyguard - Maggard, or something like that.

  'Well?' he asked again. 'Was there something you wanted?'

  Maggard said nothing and Karkasy remembered that the man was mute, thinking it foolish that anyone would send someone who couldn't speak as a messenger.

  'I can't help you unless you can tell me why you're here,' said Karkasy, speaking slowly to ensure that the man understood.

  In response, Maggard removed a folded piece of paper from his belt and held it out with his left hand. The warrior made no attempt to move closer to him, so with a resigned sigh, Karkasy put aside the Bondsman and pushed his bulky frame from the bed.

  Karkasy picked his way through the piles of notebooks and took die proffered paper. It was a sepia coloured papyrus, as was produced in the Gyptian spires, with crosshatched patterning throughout. A little gaudy for his tastes, but obviously expensive.

  'So who might this be from?' asked Karkasy, before again remembering that this messenger couldn't speak. He shook his head with an indulgent smile, unfolded the papyrus and cast his eyes over the note's contents.

  He frowned as he recognised the words as lines from his own poetry, dark imagery and potent symbolism, but they were all out of sequence, plucked from a dozen different works.

  Karkasy reached the end of the note and his bladder emptied in terror as he realised the import of the message, and its bearer's purpose.

  Petronella paced the confines of her stateroom, impatient to begin transcribing the latest thoughts of her bodyguard. The time Maggard had spent with the Astartes had been most fruitful, and she had already learned much that would otherwise have been hidden from her.

  Now a structure suggested itself, a tragic tale told in reverse order that opened on the primarch's deathbed, with a triumphal coda that spoke of his survival and of the glories yet to come. After all, she didn't want to confine herself to only one book.

  She even had a prospective title, one that she felt conveyed the correct gravitas of her subject matter, yet also included her in its meaning.

  Petronella would call this masterpiece, In The Footsteps of Gods, and had already taken its first line - that most important part of the tale where her reader was either hooked or left cold - from her own terrified thoughts at the moment of the Warmaster's collapse.

  I was there the day that Horus fell.

  It had all the right tonal qualities, leaving the reader in no doubt that they were about to read something profound, yet keeping the end of the story a jealously guarded secret.

  Everything was coming together, but Maggard was late in returning from his latest foray into the world of the Astartes and her patience was wearing thin. She had already reduced Babeth to tears in her impatient frustration, and had banished her maidservant to the tiny chamber that served as her sleeping quarters.

  She heard the sound of the door to her stateroom opening in the receiving room, and marched straight through to reprimand Maggard for his tardiness.

  'What time do you call…' she began, but the words trailed off as she saw that the figure standing before her wasn't Maggard.

  It was the Warmaster.

  He was dressed in simple robes and looked more magnificent than she could ever remember seeing him. A fierce anima surrounded him, and she found herself unable to speak as he looked up, the full force of his personality striking her.

  Standing at the door behind him was the hulking form of First Captain Abaddon. Horus looked up as she entered and nodded to Abaddon, who closed the door at his back.

  'Miss Vivar,' said the Warmaster. It took an effort of will on Petronella's part for her to find her voice.

  'Yes… my lord,' she stammered, horrified at the mess of her stateroom and that the Warmaster should see it so untidy. She must remember to punish Babeth for neglecting her duties. 'I… that is, I wasn't expecting. '

  Horus held up his hand to soothe her concerns and she fell silent.

  'I know I have been neglectful of you,' said the Warmaster.

  'You have been privy to my innermost thoughts and I allowed the concerns of the war against the Technocracy to command my attention.'

  'My lord, I never dreamed you gave me such consideration,' said Petronella.

  'You would be surprised,' smiled Horus. 'Your writing goes well?'

  'Very well, my lord,' said Petronella. 'I have been prolific since last we met.'

  'May I see?' asked Horus.

  'Of course,' she said, thrilled that he should take an interest in her work. She had to force herself to walk, not run, into her writing room, indicating the papers stacked on her escritoire.

  'It's all a bit of jumble, but everything I've written is here,' beamed Petronella. 'I would be honoured if you would critique my work. After all, who is more qualified?'

  'Quite,' agreed Horus, following her to the escritoire and taking up her most recent output. His eyes scanned the pages, reading and digesting the contents quicker than any mortal man ever could.

  She searched his face for any reaction to her words, but he was as unreadable as a statue, and she began to worry that he disapproved.

  Eventually, he placed the papers back on the escritoire and said, 'It is very good. You are a talented documentarist.'

  'Thank you, my lord,' she gushed, the power of his praise like a tonic in her veins.

  'Yes,' said Horus, his
voice cold. 'It's almost a shame that no one will ever read it.'

  Maggard reached up and grabbed the front of Karkasy's robe, spinning him around, and hooking his arm around the poet's neck. Karkasy struggled in the powerful grip, helpless against Maggard's superior strength.

  'Please!' he gasped, his terror making his voice shrill. 'No, please don't!'

  Maggard said nothing, and Karkasy heard the snap of leather as the warrior's free hand popped the stud on his holster. Karkasy fought, but he could do nothing, the crushing force of Maggard's arm around his neck robbing him of breath and blurring his vision.

  Karkasy wept bitter tears as time slowed. He heard the slow rasp of the pistol sliding from its holster and the harsh click as the hammer was drawn back.

  He bit his tongue. Bloody foam gathered in the corners of his mouth. Snot and tears mingled on his face. His legs scrabbled on the floor. Papers flew in all directions.

  Cold steel pressed into his neck, the barrel of Maggard's pistol jammed tight under his jaw.

  Karkasy smelled the gun oil.

  He wished…

  The hard bang of the pistol shot echoed deafeningly in the cramped billet.

  At first, Petronella wasn't sure she'd understood what the Warmaster meant. Why wouldn't people be able to read her work? Then she saw the cold, merciless light in Horus's eyes.

  'My lord, I'm not sure I understand you,' she said, haltingly.

  'Yes you do.'

  'No…' she whispered, backing away from him.

  The Warmaster followed her, his steps slow and measured. 'When we spoke in the apothecarion I let you look inside Pandora's Box, Miss Vivar, and for that I am truly sorry. Only one person has a need to know the things in my head, and that person is me. The things I have seen and done, the things I am going to do…'

  'Please, my lord,' said Petronella, backing out of her writing room and into the receiving room. 'If you are unhappy with what I've written, it can be revised, edited. I would give you approval on everything, of course.'