Fury of Magnus Read online

  Book 1 – THE SOLAR WAR

  Book 2 - THE LOST AND THE DAMNED

  Book 3 - THE FIRST WALL

  Book 4 - SATURNINE

  SONS OF THE SELENAR

  FURY OF MAGNUS

  Book 1 – HORUS RISING

  Book 2 – FALSE GODS

  Book 3 – GALAXY IN FLAMES

  Book 4 – THE FLIGHT OF THE EISENSTEIN

  Book 5 – FULGRIM

  Book 6 – DESCENT OF ANGELS

  Book 7 – LEGION

  Book 8 – BATTLE FOR THE ABYSS

  Book 9 – MECHANICUM

  Book 10 – TALES OF HERESY

  Book 11 – FALLEN ANGELS

  Book 12 – A THOUSAND SONS

  Book 13 – NEMESIS

  Book 14 – THE FIRST HERETIC

  Book 15 – PROSPERO BURNS

  Book 16 – AGE OF DARKNESS

  Book 17 – THE OUTCAST DEAD

  Book 18 – DELIVERANCE LOST

  Book 19 – KNOW NO FEAR

  Book 20 – THE PRIMARCHS

  Book 21 – FEAR TO TREAD

  Book 22 – SHADOWS OF TREACHERY

  Book 23 – ANGEL EXTERMINATUS

  Book 24 – BETRAYER

  Book 25 – MARK OF CALTH

  Book 26 – VULKAN LIVES

  Book 27 – THE UNREMEMBERED EMPIRE

  Book 28 – SCARS

  Book 29 – VENGEFUL SPIRIT

  Book 30 – THE DAMNATION OF PYTHOS

  Book 31 – LEGACIES OF BETRAYAL

  Book 32 – DEATHFIRE

  Book 33 – WAR WITHOUT END

  Book 34 – PHAROS

  Book 35 – EYE OF TERRA

  Book 36 – THE PATH OF HEAVEN

  Book 37 – THE SILENT WAR

  Book 38 – ANGELS OF CALIBAN

  Book 39 – PRAETORIAN OF DORN

  Book 40 – CORAX

  Book 41 – THE MASTER OF MANKIND

  Book 42 – GARRO

  Book 43 – SHATTERED LEGIONS

  Book 44 – THE CRIMSON KING

  Book 45 – TALLARN

  Book 46 – RUINSTORM

  Book 47 – OLD EARTH

  Book 48 – THE BURDEN OF LOYALTY

  Book 49 – WOLFSBANE

  Book 50 – BORN OF FLAME

  Book 51 – SLAVES TO DARKNESS

  Book 52 – HERALDS OF THE SIEGE

  Book 53 – TITANDEATH

  Book 54 – THE BURIED DAGGER

  More tales from the Horus Heresy...

  PROMETHEAN SUN

  AURELIAN

  BROTHERHOOD OF THE STORM

  THE CRIMSON FIST

  CORAX: SOULFORGE

  PRINCE OF CROWS

  DEATH AND DEFIANCE

  TALLARN: EXECUTIONER

  SCORCHED EARTH

  THE PURGE

  THE HONOURED

  THE UNBURDENED

  BLADES OF THE TRAITOR

  TALLARN: IRONCLAD

  RAVENLORD

  THE SEVENTH SERPENT

  WOLF KING

  CYBERNETICA

  SONS OF THE FORGE

  Many of these titles are also available as abridged and unabridged audiobooks. Order the full range of Horus Heresy novels and audiobooks from blacklibrary.com

  Also available

  MACRAGGE’S HONOUR

  Dan Abnett and Neil Roberts

  Audio Dramas

  THE DARK KING & THE LIGHTNING TOWER

  RAVEN’S FLIGHT

  GARRO: OATH OF MOMENT

  GARRO: LEGION OF ONE

  BUTCHER’S NAILS

  GREY ANGEL

  GARRO: BURDEN OF DUTY

  GARRO: SWORD OF TRUTH

  THE SIGILLITE

  HONOUR TO THE DEAD

  CENSURE

  WOLF HUNT

  HUNTER’S MOON

  THIEF OF REVELATIONS

  TEMPLAR

  ECHOES OF RUIN

  MASTER OF THE FIRST

  THE LONG NIGHT

  THE EAGLE’S TALON

  IRON CORPSES

  RAPTOR

  GREY TALON

  THE EITHER

  THE HEART OF THE PHAROS / CHILDREN OF SICARUS

  RED-MARKED

  ECHOES OF IMPERIUM

  ECHOES OF REVELATION

  THE THIRTEENTH WOLF

  VIRTUES OF THE SONS/SINS OF THE FATHER

  THE BINARY SUCCESSION

  DARK COMPLIANCE

  BLACKSHIELDS: THE FALSE WAR

  BLACKSHIELDS: THE RED FIEF

  HUBRIS OF MONARCHIA

  NIGHTFANE

  BLACKSHIELDS: THE BROKEN CHAIN

  Download the full range of Horus Heresy audio dramas from blacklibrary.com

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra

  Dramatis Personae

  Book One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Book Two

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Book Three

  Eight

  Nine

  Book Four

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Book Five

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Afterword

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Saturnine’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  It is a time of legend.

  The galaxy is in flames. The Emperor’s glorious vision for humanity is in ruins. His favoured son, Horus, has turned from his father’s light and embraced Chaos.

  His armies, the mighty and redoubtable Space Marines, are locked in a brutal civil war. Once, these ultimate warriors fought side by side as brothers, protecting the galaxy and bringing mankind back into the Emperor’s light. Now they are divided.

  Some remain loyal to the Emperor, whilst others have sided with the Warmaster. Pre-eminent amongst them, the leaders of their thousands-strong Legions, are the primarchs. Magnificent, superhuman beings, they are the crowning achievement of the Emperor’s genetic science. Thrust into battle against one another, victory is uncertain for either side.

  Worlds are burning. At Isstvan V, Horus dealt a vicious blow and three loyal Legions were all but destroyed. War was begun, a conflict that will engulf all mankind in fire. Treachery and betrayal have usurped honour and nobility. Assassins lurk in every shadow. Armies are gathering. All must choose a side or die.

  Horus musters his armada, Terra itself the object of his wrath. Seated upon the Golden Throne, the Emperor waits for his wayward son to return. But his true enemy is Chaos, a primordial force that seeks to enslave mankind to its capricious whims.

  The screams of the innocent, the pleas of the righteous resound to the cruel laughter of Dark Gods. Suffering and damnation await all should the Emperor fail and the war be lost.

  The end is here. The skies darken, colossal armies gather.

  For the fate of the Throneworld, for the fate of mankind itself...

  The Siege of Terra has begun.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  The XV Legion ‘Thousand Sons’

  Magnus the Red, ‘The Crimson King’, Primarch of the XV Legion

 
Ahzek Ahriman, Chief Librarian

  Amon, Equerry to the Primarch

  Menkaura, Adept of the Corvidae

  Atrahasis, Equerry to Ahriman

  The VI Legion ‘Space Wolves’

  Bödvar Bjarki, Rune Priest of Tra

  Svafnir Rackwulf, Woe-maker of Tra

  Olgyr Widdowsyn, Shield Bearer

  The XVIII Legion ‘Salamanders’

  Vulkan, ‘The Lord of Drakes’, Primarch of the XVIII Legion

  Atok Abidemi, Draaksward

  Barek Zytos, Draaksward

  Igen Gargo, Draaksward

  The IV Legion ‘Iron Warriors’

  Perturabo, ‘The Lord of Iron’, Primarch of the IV Legion

  Imperial Personae

  Malcador the Sigillite, Regent of the Imperium

  Alivia Sureka, Perpetual

  Promeus, Wyrd-wraith

  ‘War is father and king of all. It proves some to be gods, and others merely human.’

  – The Weeping Philosopher

  ‘Cannon crashes eastward: magnificent, terrible thunder. Bright flash, night bordered, a surging mass explodes in storms of iron. Pageants of fire again, again. In savage awe, we celebrate the festival of death.’

  – Pyotr Nash (First Lieutenant, 77th Europa Max)

  ‘History is trying to tell the truth through the most acceptable lie.’

  – Hari Harr, Imperial interrogator

  Time of Trial

  The day was dark with the smoke of a burning world.

  His armour’s chrono indicated it was morning, but all divisions of time were virtually meaningless now. Day, night, morning, evening… they all blended into one span of flickering, hellish light that painted everything in the colours of a banked hearth-forge.

  The distant glow of molten rock backlit misbegotten giants lumbering on the horizon, and plumes of fire from ruptured bedrock flickered low to the ground as boiling clouds of searing ash drifted over shattered ruins.

  The Time of Trial was an extinction-level event on Nocturne, a time of fire and endings during which its Promethean moon would pass so close it would all but tear the planet apart. Clashing gravitational forces reached deeps into Nocturne’s bedrock to wake the world-serpents coiled around its molten heart. Stirred from their deep slumbers, the ur-drakes roared and raged, shaking the world above with the fury of their fractured dreams.

  Their terrible heat surged forth in the lava of a thousand volcanic eruptions that blotted out the sun. The movement of their titanic limbs shook the world with cataclysmic earthquakes that reshaped Nocturne’s continents, and their breath sent boiling tsunamis to smash its coasts. And in the aftermath of their ferocious waking, a terrible winter fell upon the land as they returned to their slumbers and their searing fury subsided.

  In such times, life beyond the protected walls of Nocturne’s Sanctuary Cities became all but impossible. The plains camps, mountain holdfasts and coastal settlements emptied as Nocturne’s people sought their fragile safety. Their gates would be flung open, and any who requested shelter would be offered a place within.

  Atok Abidemi had seen only one Time of Trial before he had been chosen to join the ranks of the XVIII Legion, the Salamanders. He had been a boy, no more than four Terran-standard, but vividly remembered the sky afire with lightning as it raged with the warring of gods and the wrath of the world-serpents. Even as a child, he had seen meaning in the play of flames in the sky, fated significance in each peal of thunder and crash of volcanic fury.

  Fleeing the approaching pyro-storms, his parents had abandoned their nomadic life on the T’harken Delta and sought refuge within the walls of Skarokk, the city of the Dragonspine. All Abidemi had known was a life on the plains, hunting the leo’nid with his father and grandfather, so when the gates of the Sanctuary City closed behind him, Abidemi felt the terrible claustrophobia of being trapped in a place from which there could be no escape.

  That same sensation held his heart in a cold grip again.

  Yet this was not the Dragonspine and he was not on Nocturne.

  This was Terra.

  But it was a Time of Trial.

  ‘Stand to!’

  The cry went up along the wall, all but drowned out by Indomitor’s blaring klaxons.

  Another alert, but it wasn’t for them, not yet.

  Abidemi flexed his fingers on the grip of Draukoros. Longer than a standard chainblade, the weapon was toothed with the ebon fangs of the great drake of Nocturne whose name it now bore. Once, it had belonged to Artellus Numeon, but with his disappearance upon Mount Deathfire, the honour of its use passed to Abidemi.

  The shadow cast by its former bearer was long, and both Abidemi and the blade understood he was only its custodian. The blade would always be Numeon’s, and it was Abidemi’s fervent hope that one day he would return it to their fiery home world.

  That hope was fading with every passing day, and as the discordant clamour of war pulled him back to the present, the tragedy engulfing Terra swelled around him.

  White ash fell like snow. The sky burned with fiery colours, and the relentless drumbeat of war buckled the air with a continual ­rumble of explosions and big guns that would never tire.

  He and his two Salamanders brothers were stationed on the Indomitor Wall, the towering north-eastern bulwark of the Sanctum Imperialis, the very heartland of the Emperor’s Palace. It ­resembled nothing so much as a vast cliff carved into the bones of the mountains, twelve hundred metres tall, with an inner mustering ground behind the shielded and reinforced ramparts of its outer wall, which stepped down to layered outworks before diminishing to the ruined edges of the western Katabatic Plain.

  Its outer faces were reinforced with steel and stone, its once glorious bas-reliefs peeled away at Lord Dorn’s decree. Its function­ality was brutally simple, the newly raised drum towers, turrets and enfilading gun-boxes turning the fifteen kilometre strip of smouldering ruins beyond into a killing ground of almost ­perfect proportions.

  In any conventional engagement, it would be a nigh-impregnable barrier, but the war the traitors had brought to Terra was anything but conventional.

  Braying war-horns and screams issued from the host currently attacking the wall. Six times they had come at its defenders in the last two days, and six times they had been thrown back. Their thwarted howls were those of beasts, and to Abidemi’s ears they sounded like a barbarian horde from an earlier epoch.

  Smoke and a seething orange glow limned Indomitor’s broken-toothed defences on this seventh attack, where fifty thousand soldiers fought the blood-maddened host. Explosions and plumes of blue-green fire rippled up from the base of the wall far below. Percussive blasts rocked the walls, chewing the rockcrete in fiery bites with every impact.

  Shell blasts swept the parapet in storms of shrapnel, gunfire plucked troops from the firing step in droves, and the screams of the wounded were drowned out by the hammer blows of heavy artillery. Frag shells burst overhead, shredding flesh and stone, splintering the walls. The air was thick and toxic with a mixture of fyceline, propellant and promethium fumes.

  Blasts from the autocannon turrets and the artillery mounted on the battered slopes of the Hegemon behind them answered the roar from beyond the wall.

  But it would make little difference, the enemy host was seemingly without number.

  This portion of the wall was designated Indomitor Three.

  As much a name for us as it is the wall, thought Abidemi. Perhaps if–

  A blackened smiter’s gauntlet clapped him on the shoulder guard and a voice with the sharp accent of a Sanctuary City-dweller said, ‘Focus, brother.’

  Abidemi nodded, lifting his head from his contemplation to regard his battle-brother.

  Barek Zytos was a solid mountain of dark skin and battered warplate that had somehow retained its dark green lustre,
even amid the constant ash falls and tarry smoke banks drifting from the burning ruins of the Anterior Barbican and the smashed Brahmaputra Wall.

  Abidemi and Zytos stood with Indomitor Three’s reserve force, ten thousand soldiers and twelve ad hoc squadrons from a score of different regiments. This deep into the fighting, hundreds of Terra’s regiments had been effectively wiped out and their scattered survivors quickly organised into scratch battalions with no names save any they gave themselves.

  In honour of the Salamanders in their midst, these soldiers had named themselves Vulkan’s Own. Normally such presumption on the part of mortals would have angered Abidemi, but in this place, at this time, he understood the honour these brave men and women did them. Once, their uniforms had been different in design and colour, but weeks of fighting in the mud and gore of Terra had rendered them all the same grey-brown and painted their exhausted faces with ash and grief.

  They watched the fighting at the ramparts with a mixture of anger and horror, fearful of the slaughter being unleashed, yet eager to advance and push the enemy from the walls.

  Abidemi understood that feeling all too well.

  It railed against his warrior soul to stand and watch brother soldiers of the Imperium dying, but he and his brothers’ strength was best spent when it would have the greatest impact.

  Sensing his dark mood, Zytos nodded to the bloodshed on the wall.

  ‘This is a bad one,’ he said. ‘Yes, a bad one indeed.’

  Abidemi grunted. ‘Has there ever been a good assault?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Zytos, interlacing his fingers on the drake-skull pommel of his mighty thunder hammer. The weapon’s killing head sat between his feet, engraved with scenes from the forge, its haft a length of unbending adamantium. ‘The man who always looks to the sky does not see the drake at his feet.’

  ‘And the man who looks to the ground does not see the winged dactyl,’ finished Abidemi.

  ‘Brother, are you here?’ asked Barek. ‘Really here? Since Vulkan passed into the Palace your mind has wandered too often of late.’

  ‘Apologies, brother,’ said Abidemi, shaking his head. ‘We sacrificed so much to bring the primarch to Terra… I feel lost without his presence.’

  ‘He is here,’ said Zytos. ‘Doing his duty to the Emperor. As we must.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Abidemi. ‘But this war saps my soul as much as it tests my body.’