Sanguinius thought for a moment. Then he said, ‘I believe you are speaking for yourself. You must be pleased, Konrad. We march towards the ends we both know. Nothing has changed.’
‘Nothing ever could.’
‘Really? I don’t think you believed that on Davin.’
Unease, that emotion so strange to see on the Night Haunter’s face, appeared again. He covered it by glancing back at the stasis coffin. When he looked back at Sanguinius, his contempt was in place once more. ‘So now you take me back to face our father,’ he said.
‘You will answer for your crimes.’
‘He isn’t going to execute me. We both know that.’
‘We do,’ Sanguinius agreed. A new possibility occurred to him. He turned it over and over in his mind before he allowed himself to consider it more than wishful thinking. It rose before him, not a sudden epiphany but a slow dawn. Forged in darkness, tempered in despair, it was hope, thin as a blade, but oh, how it might serve the light. How it might be salvation.
In the midst of its lies and manipulation, Madail had spoken a truth. There had been a choice. It was possible to alter fate. The question was whether that chance had only occurred on Davin.
Sanguinius put his hope to the test. ‘Father won’t have you executed,’ he said. ‘I believe He should, but you’re right. He won’t.’
‘Prison will be very dull,’ said Curze. ‘I’ll miss our conversations.’
Sanguinius ignored the taunt. ‘Father might do worse,’ he said. He watched Curze’s face closely. ‘He might forgive you.’
He struck home. Curze’s mask of contempt fell. The unease returned. The reptilian eyes widened as they saw destiny enter a state of flux. In the storm of emotions that passed in micro-tremors over the Night Haunter, Sanguinius saw anger and doubt. He saw horror again at the thought that the universe really was not as Curze had known it to be, for so long, and so absolutely. And Sanguinius saw what he was looking for. He saw the rarest of all things in Curze’s eyes. He saw hope.
That was what he needed. That was confirmation.
He pushed Curze into the stasis coffin. The Night Haunter fell back and lay prone, helpless.
‘He might forgive you,’ Sanguinius repeated. ‘I don’t. You cannot have that redemption. I won’t let you. Rest certain in your destiny. You will have it. I am not taking you to Father.’
‘You can’t kill me either. I die at the hand of Father’s assassin.’
‘I’m not going to kill you. I am going to jettison your coffin into the void. The assassin will find you when the time comes. It may be millennia, Konrad.’
The hope vanished forever from Curze’s eyes, replaced by a different form of horror.
‘You claim destiny can’t be altered,’ Sanguinius continued. ‘So be it. Yours will be as you say.’
He stepped back and depressed a pad on the side of the coffin, generating the stasis field. It froze Curze in mid-scream.
Sanguinius turned from his brother. He moved to the vault door. He did not open it immediately. Before he saw Azkaellon, before he looked upon any of his sons, he thought about his fate and hope.
He would meet Horus on the Vengeful Spirit. He accepted the inalterability of his fate to that point. But he had learned that destiny could change. Perhaps there was still a choice to come, only it was not his.
Horus was not Curze. What he had been was too magnificent to be lost utterly. Sanguinius would summon it again. He had passed through the Delphos and triumphed. He would save Horus. The spear thrust that had felled the Undivided and pierced the Ruinstorm was not done yet. He would see it unmake the dark to come.
He reached for the vault door, ready to see his Blood Angels. His decisions were clear, his path shining. He would walk this road, and save his sons from the Black Rage.
Metal ground against metal as he opened the door. The sound was high-pitched. Its reverberations sounded oddly down the hall, as if they were the echoes of a scream yet to come.
Afterword
When I sat down to write Ruinstorm, I kept thinking about Dan Abnett’s afterword to The Unremembered Empire, and how he found that book to be the most difficult he had written for the series. Dan is a very wise man, and I experienced something very similar on a number of fronts. Every book brings its own challenges. This was true of my first Horus Heresy book, The Damnation of Pythos, as well. But though Pythos took place in the immediate wake of major events (that little fracas on Isstvan V), the plot of the novel was relatively isolated from the main threads of the series (until the volume you hold in your hands, of course). Furthermore, the characters I was dealing with were all new.
Come Ruinstorm, and the situation was rather different. This time, the characters were not only well established, they were primarchs. Four of them. Reaching a turning point in the war. So, no pressure. The immediate challenge that I faced was not only to pick up the threads of the preceding entries and not get them tangled up, but also to do justice to these characters and to the masterful novels that preceded mine. Given where things were going to end for these four, I wanted to give them a good send-off.
But with the challenges, there was also excitement. (They tend to be entwined. That’s one of the joys of this game.) When I sat down with Laurie Goulding to talk about the book, and I learned what the goal of this story was, yeah, I was plenty excited. If there was to be a turning point, then the events should be big, and I wanted everything to be on a suitably gigantic scale. As I believe I’ve mentioned before, one of the things I love about writing Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 fiction is its commitment to the operatic, the monumental, the grandiose. The goal I set myself, then, was to come up with set pieces that would embody these principles, while also working within the theme of the novel.
And that theme presented itself almost immediately. In order to reach Terra, the primarchs would have to defeat the Ruinstorm. And Sanguinius was going to be tempted again, this time where Horus fell. It seemed to me, then, that the Ruinstorm should be a metaphor just as much as it was a literal obstacle. I saw the tale as being about multiple temptations. Each primarch would face his own Ruinstorm. Sanguinius had triumphed over temptation once already, in Fear to Tread, but I believe it is fitting that he undergoes a second trial. The Angel’s two temptations thus mirror the two curses of the Blood Angels, one that already almost destroyed them, and one lying in wait to blight their times ahead. If the physical scale of Madail’s works (or, to be more precise, the things his passage has brought into being) is so huge, then the more insidious aspects of his plan should also be potentially catastrophic on a similar scale. Therefore, Guilliman and the Lion should also be tempted to the edge of damnation. My idea here was to show not just how powerful the Ruinous Powers are, but also to underscore the tragedy of the fall of Horus and the rest.
I remember my delight, while reading the first novels of the Horus Heresy, to experience the complexity of the corruption of Horus, and to see that the Emperor’s dream was always hubristic, always doomed to fail. The blindness and the darkness were already there. But here another question arises, one that I have tried to grapple with in these pages too. What is the role of free will in this grand tragedy of the Imperium? Is fate truly unalterable? This is a big part of the paradoxes of Sanguinius and Curze. It is one thing for us, as readers, to know how things turn out. We are not the players on the stage. But what of these players who do know some of what is coming? Foreknowledge certainly didn’t help Oedipus avoid his fate, and Curze would seem to revel darkly in the inevitability of his doom. But perhaps Sanguinius is part of an unfortunate lineage, from Oedipus to Macbeth to Jake Gittes of Chinatown and beyond. These characters know just enough about the future that their efforts to forestall disaster only ensure its arrival. Furthermore, how responsible is each primarch for his own downfall? With these questions in mind, I wanted to explore, through Sanguinius (and much to the horror of Curze),
the potential mutability of fate.
So that was a lot of fun. And there was a special enjoyment, too, in bringing Madail and the Veritas Ferrum into the heart of the war. The daemon ship has been a Chekhov’s gun waiting to be fired until now, and it was deeply satisfying to pull the trigger. This was also a chance for me to explore the nature of Madail a bit further. The caption of his illustration in Visions of Heresy, describing this being as a ‘daemonic priest,’ fascinated me from the moment Laurie first suggested Madail as the villain in The Damnation of Pythos. Taking the description at its most literal, what would it mean for a daemon to be a priest? What is the role of faith when the faithful is itself of (dark) divine essence? Madail has always struck me as a pure servant of Chaos, bowing to all the Gods, somehow squaring the circle of maintaining allegiance to them all. And if you should see, in what is intended for Sanguinius, echoes of the Everchosen, I can assure you that no, that is not a coincidence.
The writing of this book has been a journey, and I could not have reached its conclusion without the incredible support of everyone at Black Library. I would particularly like to thank Laurie Goulding, for getting me launched on Ruinstorm, for his enthusiasm and copious notes as we hammered out the story and themes, and for his years of extraordinary service to the Horus Heresy as a whole. And special thanks also to Nick Kyme, for his editorial brilliance (as ever), and for his help on all fronts during this process. Thanks, too, to all my co-authors in the series, especially Dan Abnett, Guy Haley, Graham McNeill, James Swallow and Gav Thorpe, whose works were instrumental to my efforts here. I hope I have done them justice.
Finally, my thanks, as ever, to Margaux, for always being there, and for more than I can fit into these paltry words.
Thanks to all for seeing me through the storm.
David Annandale,
April 2017
About the Author
David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos and the Primarchs novel Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar. He has also written Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, including Warden of the Blade, and The Last Wall, The Hunt for Vulkan and Watchers in Death for The Beast Arises. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction set in The Horus Heresy, Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.
An extract from Tallarn.
Lieutenant Tahirah – officer commanding First Squadron, Amaranth Company, Jurnian 701st Armoured – swore as the tank braked sharply. She was still swearing as she came off the empty gun mount and spun through the air. The ground hit her hard as she tried to turn her fall into a roll. She skidded across the floor in a tangle of arms and legs, hit the tarpaulin-covered crates and stopped. The air thumped from her lungs. That stopped the swearing. She felt the cool rockcrete press against her cheek. A dull pain filled her chest. Her mouth was open; she could feel her lips and tongue flapping as she tried to breathe.
I must look like a fish, she thought.
The rest of the crew were laughing now, the sound blending with the idle growl of the tank’s engine. The Mars-pattern chassis was grumbling where it stood a few paces away. Still in its factory grey, it did not look like a battle tank. Where the turret should have been was only a greased collar, and an opening into the chassis’s guts. Hull and sponson gun mounts were just empty slots. She could see the gunner girl Genji grinning out at her from where the forward hull weapon should be. Lachlan sat on the tank’s right sponson, Makis and Vail on the top of the hull, legs dangling into the machine’s open guts.
‘Inspecting the floor, Tah?’ The voice was high-pitched, almost boyish. Udo. It would be Udo. They all laughed some more. Terra, it was not even a good joke.
‘Just trying... to escape... your company.’
They laughed, and she breathed quietly.
The fall was her fault really. Udo could not drive to save his life, and the top of the gun mount had been a stupid place to sit for the ride. Even so she had to try very, very hard not to consider standing up and shooting Udo in the face. She pushed herself to her knees as a pathetic sip of air reached her lungs. She stood up, picked up her cap and jammed it back on her head. She was tall for a machine rider, but would have been short for an infantry officer. Wiry, warm-skinned and sharp-faced, she had a smile that she thought showed too many teeth, and her grey-and-greens always looked baggy, no matter their size.
She glanced away from the tank, as much to hide the fact that she had still not got her breath as to take the sight in. Behind the idling vehicle the chamber extended away, a vast rockcrete cavern lit by harsh light. Now that she was not riding on the tank she noticed how the sound of the engine had filled the space with echoes. The floor was a patina of oil stains and gouge marks from heavy tracks. A fine gritty layer of dust covered everything, and there was a cool, slightly musty smell, which betrayed that the ventilation system had not been active for some time. Somewhere above them, separated by layers of rock, plascrete and steel, was the Sapphire City, bustling with life while beneath it a warren of military shelters lay all but empty.
It was not actually empty, of course: two regiments and a few other stranded units lived in the upper sections. Then there were the stores, supplies for campaigns that had most likely ended long ago, all rusting and decaying in silence. Even in caverns like this one, there were crates stacked against the walls, and big blocky shapes under regulation green tarps. Despite that, an entire armoured regiment, perhaps two, could have vanished into the remaining space.
And there were more shelters, ten more in this complex alone, and more complexes all across Tallarn. Space enough for a star-cluster-breaking army to gather.
Not any more, thought Tahirah. She had never really bothered with the unoccupied parts of the underground shelter until now. Three damned years and she had never thought to look around.
The rest of them had, of course. She had the feeling that Makis and Genji knew far more about the complex than was healthy, but then what else was there to do? It was Makis who had found the chamber, and suggested taking one of the incomplete machines for a joyride. At least that was how it had seemed. Tahirah had a feeling that this was not the first time her crew had passed the time this way, just the first time they had asked her along.
Tahirah and the rest of the Jurnian 701st had been in holding condition – pre-deployment – on Tallarn for twenty-seven Solar months. After six months they had gone through every drill imaginable just to try and bleed off some of the tension running through the unit. There had been fights, both amongst the crews of the 701st, and with the Chalcisorian 1002nd Mechanised who shared the complex. There had been floggings. It had made no difference. They were all clamped down too tight waiting for a war that seemed to have forgotten that they were waiting.
Then the news had come. The Imperium was at war with itself. Horus, Warmaster of the Great Crusade, had turned upon the Emperor and half the fighting power of the Imperium had turned with him. Some had doubted that it was true, as though the lack of immediate sound and fury denied the possibility of Horus’s treachery. And still Tahirah’s unit had remained without orders, without a ship to carry them to a front, without a war that wanted them.
Tahirah turned and saw Makis leaning down into the tank’s open turret ring just behind the driver’s position.
‘Get out of the seat, Udo,’ he said, his voice low and measured.
‘Why? Can’t I make a mistake while I learn?’
She could not see Udo but the whiny bastard’s voice was more distinctive than his ratty face.
Makis scratched the grey stubble on his chin, and gave a small shake of his head. Lachlan caught her eye from where he sat on the top of the right sponson. He tilted his head and raised an ey
ebrow.
‘Just get out,’ said Makis.
Udo’s head popped out of the turret collar, his spot-covered scalp gleaming in the light. He reached up for someone to give him a hand. No one did. After a second he pulled himself up, his faced pinched with the effort. The kid was all pale skin and ribs under his grey-and-green fatigues.
‘I didn’t hit anything,’ Udo protested as he stood on the upper hull.
Makis said nothing, but swung down into the driver’s seat.
‘Oh. You were trying to avoid hitting anything?’ said Vail. ‘Sorry, I thought you were being reckless. I guess incompetent is better.’
‘It was funny.’ Udo’s thin face was pinched and red. ‘You guys laughed.’
‘Udo.’ Vail had turned his head, a frown bunching above his black eyes. ‘Shut up.’
‘I didn’t hit anything,’ mumbled Udo again as he sat down, his legs hanging into the turret collar, and he shot a sour look at Vail. The tattooed loader closed his eyes as if he were catching up on some sleep. Udo flushed pink with anger.
Udo. She should do something about Udo. Her crew was doing what small groups of bored people that spent too much time with each other did: they found an outlet for their frustration. She should have done something about it months ago. She had always got results from her crews without using the hard methods of other officers. It was getting to her – the waiting and not knowing. She bit her lip as she watched Udo glance again at Vail, then down into the tank where Makis settled into the driver’s seat. She really should have done something months ago. Her skills were slipping. She ran a hand through her close-cropped hair.
She would do something.
Udo gave Vail another glance, then spat onto the tank’s hull. The saliva drooled down the grey-sprayed metal.
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