False Gods Read online

  THE HORUS HERESY

  Graham McNeill

  FALSE GODS

  The heresy takes root

  v1.2 (2011.11)

  The Horus Heresy

  It is a time of legend.

  Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

  The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.

  Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.

  First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superheroic beings who have led the Emperor’s armies of Space Marines in victory after victory. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation. The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

  Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.

  Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.

  Horus is a star ascendant, but how far can a star rise before it falls?

  CONTENTS

  FALSE GODS

  The Horus Heresy

  CONTENTS

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  PART TWO

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  PART THREE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  PART FOUR

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  The Sons of Horus

  THE WARMASTER HORUS, Commander of the Sons of Horus Legion

  EZEKYLE ABADDON, First Captain of the Sons of Horus

  TARIK TORGADDON, Captain, 2nd Company, Sons of Horus

  IACTON QRUZE, ‘THE HALF-HEARD’, Captain, 3rd Company, Sons of Horus

  HASTUR SEJANUS, Captain, 4th Company, Sons of Horus (Deceased)

  HORUS AXIMAND, ‘LITTLE HORUS’, Captain, 5th Company, Sons of Horus

  SERGHAR TARGOST, Captain, 7th Company, Sons of Horus, lodge master

  GARVIEL LOKEN, Captain, 10th Company, Sons of Horus

  LUC SEDIRAE, Captain, 13th Company, Sons of Horus

  TYBALT MARR, ‘THE EITHER’, Captain, 18th Company, Sons of Horus

  VERULAM MOY, ‘THE OR’, Captain, 19th Company, Sons of Horus

  KALUS EKADDON, Captain, Catulan Reaver Squad, Sons of Horus

  FALKUS KIBRE, ‘WIDOWMAKER’, Captain, Justaerin Terminator Squad, Sons of Horus

  NERO VIPUS, Sergeant, Locasta Tactical Squad, Sons of Horus

  MALOGHURST, ‘THE TWISTED’, Equerry to the Warmaster

  The Primarchs

  ANGRON, Primarch of the World Eaters

  FULGRIM, Primarch of the Emperor’s Children

  Other Space Marines

  EREBUS, First Chaplain of the Word Bearers

  KHARN, Captain, 8th Assault Company of the World Eaters

  The Legio Mortis

  PRINCEPS ESAU TURNET, Commander of the Dies Irae, an Imperator-class Titan

  MODERATI PRIMUS CASSAR, One of the senior crew of the Dies Irae

  MODERATI PRIMUS ARUKEN, Another of the Dies Irae’s crew

  The Davinites

  LODGE PRIESTESS AKSHUB, Leader of the Lodge of the Serpent

  TSI REKH, Davinite liaison

  TSEPHA, A cultist of Davin and facilitator for Akshub

  Non-Astartes Imperials

  PETRONELLA VIVAR, Palatina Majoria of House Carpinus – one of the scions of a wealthy noble family of Terra

  MAGGARD, Bodyguard to Petronella

  LORD COMMANDER VARVARUS, Commander of Imperial Army forces attached to Horus’s Legion

  MECHANICUM ADEPT REGULUS, Mechanicum representative to Horus, he commands the Legion’s robots and maintains its fighting machines

  PART ONE

  THE BETRAYER

  I was there the day that Horus fell…

  ‘It is the folly of men to believe that they are great players on the stage of history, that their actions might affect the grand procession that is the passage of time. It is an insulating conceit a powerful man might clasp tight to his bosom that he might sleep away the night, safe in the knowledge that, but for his presence, the world would not turn, the mountains would crumble and the seas dry up. But if the remembrance of history has taught us anything, it is that, in time, all things will pass. Unnumbered civilisations before ours are naught but dust and bones, and the greatest heroes of their age are forgotten legends. No man lives forever and even as memory fades, so too will any remembrance of him.

  ‘It is a universal truth and an unavoidable law that cannot be denied, despite the protestations of the vain, the arrogant and the tyrannical.

  ‘Horus was the exception.’

  — Kyril Sindermann, Preface to the Remembrancers

  ‘It would take a thousand clichés to describe the Warmaster, each one truer than the last.’

  — Petronella Vivar, Palatina Majoria of House Carpinus

  ‘Everything degenerates in the hands of men.’

  — Ignace Karkasy, Meditations on the Elegiac Hero

  ONE

  Scion of Terra

  Colossi

  Rebel moon

  CYCLOPEAN MAGNUS, ROGAL Dorn, Leman Russ: names that rang with history, names that shaped history. Her eyes roamed further up the list: Corax, Night Haunter, Angron… and so on through a legacy of heroism and conquest, of worlds reclaimed in the name of the Emperor as part of the ever-expanding Imperium of Man.

  It thrilled her just to hear the names in her head.

  But greater than any of them was the name at the top of the list.

  Horus: the Warmaster.

  Lupercal, she heard his soldiers now called him – an affectionate nickname for their beloved commander. It was a name earned in the fires of battle: on Ullanor, on Murder, on Sixty-Three Nineteen, – a world the deluded inhabitants had, in their ignorance, known as Terra – and a thousand other battles she had not yet committed to her mnemonic implants.

  The thought that she was so very far from the sprawling family estates of Kairos and would soon set foot on the Vengeful Spirit to record living history took her breath away. But she was here to do more than simply record history unfolding; she knew, deep in her soul, that Horus was history.

  She ran a hand through her long, midnight black hair, swept up in a style considered chic in the Terran court – not that anyone this far out in space would know, allowing her fingernails to trace a path down her smooth, unblemished skin. Her olive skinned features had been carefully moulded by a life of wealth and facial sculpting to be regal and distinguished, with just the fashionable amount of aloofness crafted into the proud sweep of her jawline.

  Tall and striking, she sat at her maplewood escritoire, a family heirloom her father proudly boasted had been a gift from the Emperor to his great, great grandmother after the great oath-ta
king in the Urals. She tapped on her dataslate with a gold tipped mnemo-quill, its reactive nib twitching in response to her excitement. Random words crawled across the softly glowing surface, the quill’s organic stem-crystals picking up the surface thoughts from her frontal lobes.

  Crusade… Hero… Saviour… Destroyer.

  She smiled and erased the words with a swipe of an elegantly manicured nail, the edge smooth down to the fractal level, and began to write with pronounced, cursive sweeps of the quill.

  It is with great heart and a solemn sense of honour that I, Petronella Vivar, Palatina Majoria of House Carpinus do pen these words. For many a long year I have journeyed from Terra, enduring many travails and inconveniences…

  Petronella frowned and quickly erased the words she had written, angry at having copied the unnatural affectedness that so infuriated her in the remembrancers’ scripts that had been sent back from the leading edge of the Great Crusade.

  Sindermann’s texts in particular irritated her, though of late they had become few and far between. Dion Phraster produced some passable symphonies – nothing that would enjoy more than a day or so of favour in the Terran ballrooms – but pleasing enough; and the landscapes of Keland Roget were certainly vibrant, but possessed a hyperbole of brush stroke that she felt was unwarranted.

  Ignace Karkasy had written some passable poems, but they painted a picture of the Crusade she often thought unflattering to such a wondrous undertaking (especially Blood Through Misunderstanding) and she often asked herself why the Warmaster allowed him to pen such words. She wondered if perhaps the subtexts of the poetry went over his head, and then laughed at the thought that anything could get past one such as Horus.

  She sat back on her chair and placed the quill in the Lethe-well as a sudden, treacherous doubt gnawed at her. She was so critical of the other remembrancers, but had yet to test her own mettle amongst them.

  Could she do any better? Could she meet with the greatest hero of the age – a god some called him, although that was a ridiculous, outmoded concept these days – and achieve what they had, in her opinion, singularly failed to do? Who was she to believe that her paltry skill could do justice to the mighty tales the Warmaster was forging, hot on the anvil of battle?

  Then she remembered her lineage and her posture straightened. Was she not of House Carpinus, finest and most influential of the noble houses in Terran aristocracy? Had not House Carpinus chronicled the rise of the Emperor and his domain throughout the Wars of Unification, watching it grow from a planet-spanning empire to one that was even now reaching from one side of the galaxy to the other to reclaim mankind’s lost realm?

  As though seeking further reassurance, Petronella opened a flat blotting folder with a monogrammed leather cover and slid a sheaf of papers from inside it. At the top of the pile was a pict image of a fair-haired Astartes in burnished plate, kneeling before a group of his peers as one of them presented a long, trailing parchment to him. Petronella knew that these were called oaths of moment, vows sworn by warriors before battle to pledge their skill and devotion to the coming fight. An intertwined ‘EK’ device in the corner of the pict identified it as one of Euphrati Keeler’s images, and though she was loath to give any of the remembrancers credit, this piece was simply wondrous.

  Smiling, she slid the pict to one side, to reveal a piece of heavy grain cartridge paper beneath. The paper bore the familiar double-headed eagle watermark, representing the union of the Mechanicum of Mars and the Emperor, and the script was written in the short, angular strokes of the Sigillite’s hand, the quick pen strokes and half-finished letters speaking of a man writing in a hurry. The upward slant to the tails of the high letters indicated that he had a great deal on his mind, though why that should be so, now that the Emperor had returned to Terra, she did not know.

  She smiled as she studied the letter for what must have been the hundredth time since she had left the port at Gyptus, knowing that it represented the highest honour accorded to her family.

  A shiver of anticipation travelled along her spine as she heard far distant klaxons, and a distorted automated voice, coming from the gold-rimmed speakers in the corridor outside her suite, declared that her vessel had entered high anchor around the planet.

  She had arrived.

  Petronella pulled a silver sash beside the escritoire and, barely a moment later, the door chime rang and she smiled, knowing without turning that only Maggard would have answered her summons so quickly. Though he never uttered a word in her presence – nor ever would, thanks to the surgery she’d had the family chaperones administer – she always knew when he was near by the agitated jitter of her mnemo-quill as it reacted to the cold steel bite of his mind.

  She spun around in her deeply cushioned chair and said, ‘Open,’

  The door swung smoothly open and she let the moment hang as Maggard waited for permission to stand in her presence.

  ‘I give you leave to enter,’ she said and watched as her dour bodyguard of twenty years smoothly crossed the threshold into her frescoed suite of gold and scarlet. His every move was controlled and tight, as though his entire body – from the hard, sculpted muscles of his legs, to his wide, powerful shoulders – was in tension.

  He moved to the side as the door shut behind him, his dancing, golden eyes sweeping the vaulted, filigreed ceiling and the adjacent anterooms in a variety of spectra for anything suspect. He kept one hand on the smooth grip of his pistol, the other on the grip of his gold-bladed Kirlian rapier. His bare arms bore the faint scars of augmetic surgery, pale lines across his dark skin, as did the tissue around his eyes where house chirurgeons had replaced them with expensive biometric spectral enhancers to enable him better to protect the scion of House Carpinus.

  Clad in gold armour of flexing, ridged bands and silver mail, Maggard nodded in unsmiling acknowledgement that all was clear, though Petronella could have told him that without all his fussing. But since his life was forfeit should anything untoward befall her, she supposed she could understand his caution.

  ‘Where is Babeth?’ asked Petronella, slipping the Sigillite’s letter back into the blotter and lifting the mnemo-quill from the Lethe-well. She placed the nib on the dataslate and cleared her mind, allowing Maggard’s thoughts to shape the words his throat could not, frowning as she read what appeared.

  ‘She has no business being asleep,’ said Petronella. ‘Wake her. I am to be presented to the mightiest hero of the Great Crusade and I’m not going before him looking as though I’ve just come from some stupid pilgrim riot on Terra. Fetch her and have her bring the velveteen gown, the crimson one with the high collars. I’ll expect her within five minutes.’

  Maggard nodded and withdrew from her presence, but not before she felt the delicious thrill of excitement as the mnemo-quill twitched in her grip and scratched a last few words on the dataslate.

  …ing bitch…

  IN ONE OF the ancient tongues of Terra its name meant ‘Day of Wrath’ and Jonah Aruken knew that the name was well deserved. Rearing up before him like some ancient god of a forgotten time, the Dies Irae stood as a vast monument to war and destruction, its armoured head staring proudly over the assembled ground crew that milled around it like worshippers.

  The Imperator-class Titan represented the pinnacle of the Mechanicum’s skill and knowledge, the culmination of millennia of war and military technology. The Titan had no purpose other than to destroy, and had been designed with all the natural affinity for the business of killing that mankind possessed. Like some colossal armoured giant of steel, the Titan stood forty-three metres tall on crenellated bastion legs, each one capable of mounting a full company of soldiers and their associated supporting troops.

  Jonah watched as a long banner of gold and black was unfurled between the Titan’s legs, like the loincloth of some feral savage, emblazoned with the death’s head symbol of the Legio Mortis. Scores of curling scrolls, each bearing the name of a glorious victory won by the Warmaster, were stitched to the hono
ur banner and Jonah knew that there would be many more added before the Great Crusade was over.

  Thick, ribbed cables snaked from the shielded power cores in the hangar’s ceiling towards the Titan’s armoured torso, where the mighty war engine’s plasma reactor was fed with the power of a caged star.

  Its adamantine hull was scarred and pitted with the residue of battle, the tech-adepts still patching it up after the fight against the megarachnid. Nevertheless, it was a magnificent and humbling sight, though not one that could dull the ache in his head and the churning in his belly from too much amasec the night before.

  Giant, rumbling cranes suspended from the ceiling lifted massive hoppers of shells and long, snub-nosed missiles into the launch bays of the Titan’s weapon mounts. Each gun was the size of a hab-block, massive rotary cannons, long-range howitzers and a monstrous plasma cannon with the power to level cities. He watched the ordnance crews prep the weapons, feeling the familiar flush of pride and excitement as he made his way towards the Titan, and smiled at the obvious masculine symbolism of a Titan being made ready for war.

  He jumped as a gurney laden with Vulkan bolter shells sped past him, just barely avoiding him as it negotiated its way at speed through the organised chaos of ground personnel, Titan crews and deck hands. It squealed to a halt and the driver’s head snapped around.

  ‘Watch where the hell you’re going, you damn fool!’ shouted the driver, rising from his seat and striding angrily towards him. ‘You Titan crewmen think you can swan about like pirates, well this is my—’

  The words died in the man’s throat and he snapped to attention as he saw the garnet studs and the winged skull emblem on the shoulder boards of Jonah’s uniform jacket that marked him as a moderati primus of the Dies Irae.

  ‘Sorry,’ smiled Jonah, spreading his arms in a gesture of amused apology as he watched the man fight the urge to say more. ‘Didn’t see you there, chief, got a hell of a hangover. Anyway, what the devil are you doing driving so fast? You could have killed me.’

  ‘You just walked out in front of me, sir,’ said the man, staring fixedly at a point just over Jonah’s shoulder.