Galaxy in Flames (24 page)

‘You are remembrancers,’ said Keeler, a quiet sadness in her voice. ‘Both of you. Remember this and pass it on. Someone must know.’

He nodded dumbly, too numbed by what he was seeing to say anything.

‘Come on,’ said Euphrati. ‘We have to go.’

‘Go?’ sobbed Mersadie, her eyes still fixed on the death of a world. ‘Go where?’

‘Away,’ smiled Euphrati, taking their hands and leading them through the immobile, horrified throng of remembrancers towards the edge of the chamber.

At first, Sindermann let her lead him, his limbs unable to do more than simply place one foot in front of another, but as he saw she was taking them towards the Astartes at the edge of the chamber, he began to pull back in alarm.

‘Euphrati!’ he hissed. ‘What are you doing? If those Astartes recognize us—’

‘Trust me, Kyril,’ she said. ‘I’m counting on that.’ Euphrati led them towards a hulking warrior who stood apart from the others, and Sindermann knew enough of body language to know that this man was as horrified as they were at what was happening.

The Astartes turned to face them, his face craggy and ancient, worn like old leather.

Euphrati stopped in front of him and said, ‘Iacton. I need your help.’

Iacton Qruze. Sindermann had heard Loken speak of him. The ‘half-heard’.

He was a warrior of the old days, whose voice carried no weight amongst the higher echelons of command.
A warrior of the old days…

‘
You need my help?’ asked Qruze. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Euphrati Keeler and this is Mersadie Oliton,’ said Euphrati, as if her introductions in the midst of such carnage were the most normal thing in the world, ‘and this is Kyril Sindermann.’

Sindermann could see the recognition in Qruze’s face and he closed his eyes as he awaited the inevitable shout that would see them revealed.

‘Loken asked me to look out for you,’ said Qruze.

‘Loken?’ asked Mersadie. ‘Have you heard from him?’

Qruze shook his head, but said, ‘He asked me to keep you safe while he was gone. I think I know what he meant now.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Sindermann, not liking the way Qruze kept casting wary glances at the armed warriors that lined the walls of the chamber.

‘Never mind,’ said Qruze.

‘Iacton,’ commanded Euphrati, her voice laden with quiet authority. ‘Look at me.’

The craggy-featured Astartes looked down at the slight form of Euphrati, and Sindermann could feel the power and determination that flowed from her.

‘You are the half-heard no longer,’ said Euphrati. ‘Now your voice will be heard louder than any other in your Legion. You cling to the old ways and wish them to return with the fond nostalgia of the venerable. Those days are dying here, Iacton, but with your help we can bring them back again.’

‘What are you talking about, woman?’ snarled Qruze.

‘I want you to remember Cthonia,’ said Euphrati, and Sindermann recoiled as he felt an electric surge of energy spark from her, as if her very skin was charged.

‘What do you know of the planet of my birth?’

‘Only what I see inside you, Iacton,’ said Euphrati, a soft glow building behind her eyes and filling her words with promise and seduction. ‘The honour and the valor from which the Luna Wolves were forged. You are the only one who remembers, Iacton. You’re the only one left that still embodies what it is to be an Astartes.’

‘You know nothing of me,’ he said, though Sindermann could see her words were reaching him, breaking down the barriers the Astartes erected between themselves and mortals.

‘Your brothers called you the Half-heard, but you do not take them to task for it. I know this is because a Cthonian warrior is honorable and cares not for petty insults. I also know that your counsel is not heard because yours is the voice of a past age, when the Great Crusade was a noble thing, done not for gain, but for the good of all humankind.’

Sindermann watched as Qruze’s face spoke volumes of the conflict raging within his soul.

Loyalty to his Legion vied with loyalty to the ideals that had forged it.

At last he smiled ruefully and said, ‘“Nothing too arduous” he said.’

He looked over towards the Warmaster and Maloghurst. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

‘Where to?’ asked Sindermann.

‘To safety,’ replied Qruze. ‘Loken asked me to look out for you and that’s what I’m going to do. Now be silent and follow me.’

Qruze turned on his heel and marched towards one of the many doors that led out of the audience chamber. Euphrati followed the warrior and Sindermann and Mersadie trotted along after her, unsure as to where they were going or why. Qruze reached the door, a large portal of polished bronze guarded by two warriors, moving them aside with a chopping wave of his hand. ‘I’m taking these ones below,’ he said. ‘Our orders are that no one is to leave,’ said one of the guards.

‘And I am issuing you new orders,’ said Qruze, a steely determination that Sindermann had not noticed earlier underpinning his words. ‘Move aside, or are you disobeying the order of a superior officer?’

‘No, sir,’ said the warriors, bowing and hauling open the bronze door.

Qruze nodded to the guards and gestured that the four of them should pass through.

Sindermann, Euphrati and Mersadie left the audience chamber, the door slamming behind them with an awful finality. With the sounds of the dying planet and the gasps of shock suddenly cut off, the silence that enveloped them was positively unnerving.

‘Now what do we do?’ asked Mersadie.

‘I get us as far away from the
Vengeful Spirit
as possible,’ answered Qruze.

‘Off the ship?’ asked Sindermann.

‘Yes,’ said Qruze. ‘It is not safe for your kind now. Not safe at all.’

TWELVE

Cleansing

Let the galaxy burn

God Machine

T
HE SCREAMING OF
the Choral City’s death throes came in tremendous waves, battering against the Precentor’s Palace like a tsunami. In the streets below and throughout the palace, the people of the Choral City were decaying where they stood, bodies coming apart in torrents of disintegrating flesh.

The people thronged in the streets to die, keening their hatred and fear up at the sky, imploring their gods to deliver them. Millions of people screamed at once and the result was a terrible black-stained gale of death. A Warsinger soared overhead, trying to ease the agony and terror of their deaths with her songs, but the virus found her too, and instead of singing the praises of Isstvan’s gods she coughed out black plumes as the virus tore through her insides. She fell like a shot bird, twirling towards the dying below.

A bulky shape appeared on the roof of the Precentor’s Palace. Ancient Rylanor strode to the edge of the roof, overlooking the scenes of horror below, the viral carnage seething between the buildings. Rylanor’s dreadnought body was sealed against the world outside, sealed far more effectively than any Astartes armour, and the deathly wind swirled harmlessly around him as he watched the city’s death unfold.

Rylanor looked up towards the sky, where far above, the Warmaster’s fleet was still emptying the last of its deathly payload onto Isstvan III. The ancient dreadnought stood alone, the only note of peace in the screaming horror of the Choral City’s death.

‘G
OOD JOB WE
built these bunkers tough,’ said Captain Ehrlen.

The darkness of the sealed bunker was only compounded by the sounds of death from beyond its thick walls. Pitifully few of the World Eaters had made it into the network of bunkers that fringed the edge of the trench network and barricaded themselves inside. They waited in the dark, listening to the virus killing off the city’s population more efficiently than even their chainaxes could.

Tarvitz waited amongst them, listening to the deaths of millions of people in mute horror. The World Eaters appeared to be unmoved, the deaths of civilians meaning nothing to them.

The screaming was dying down, replaced by a dull moaning. Pain and fear mingled in a distant roar of slow death.

‘How much longer must we hide like rats in the dark?’ demanded Ehrlen.

‘The virus will burn itself out quickly,’ said Tarvitz. ‘That’s what it’s designed to do: eat away anything living and leave a battlefield for the enemy to take.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Ehrlen. Tarvitz looked at him. He could tell Ehrlen the truth, and he knew that he deserved it, but what good would it do? The World Eaters might kill him for even saying it. After all, their own primarch was part of the Warmaster’s conspiracy.

‘I have seen such weapons employed before,’ said Tarvitz.

‘You had better be right,’ snarled Ehrlen, sounding far from satisfied with Tarvitz’s answer. ‘I won’t cower here for much longer!’

The World Eater looked over his warriors, their bloodstained armoured bodies packed close together in the darkness of the bunker. He raised his axe and called, ‘Wrathe! Have you raised the Sons of Horus?’

‘Not yet,’ replied Wrathe. Tarvitz could see he was a veteran, with numerous cortical implants blistered across his scalp. ‘There’s chatter, but nothing direct.’

‘So they’re still alive?’

‘Maybe.’

Ehrlen shook his head. ‘They got us. We thought we’d taken this city and they got us.’

‘None of us could have known,’ said Tarvitz.

‘No. There are no excuses,’ Ehrlen’s face hardened. ‘The World Eaters must always go further than the enemy. When they attack, we charge right back at them. When they dig in, we dig them out. When they kill our warriors, we kill their cities, but this time, the enemy went further than we did. We attacked their city, and they destroyed it to take us with them.’

‘We were all caught out, captain,’ said Tarvitz. ‘The Emperor’s Children, too.’

‘No, Tarvitz, this was our fight. The Emperor’s Children and the Sons of Horus were to behead the beast, but we were sent to cut its heart out. This was an enemy that could not be scared away or thrown into confusion. The Isstvanians had to be killed. Whether the other Legions acknowledge it or not, the World Eaters were the ones who had to win this city, and we take responsibility for our failures.’

‘It’s not your responsibility,’ said Tarvitz. ‘A lesser soldier pretends that his failures are those of his commanders,’ said Ehrlen. ‘An Astartes realizes they are his alone.’

‘No, captain,’ said Tarvitz. ‘You don’t understand. I mean—’

‘Got something,’ said Wrathe from the corner of the bunker. ‘The Sons of Horus?’ asked Ehrlen.

Wrathe shook his head. ‘Death Guard. They took cover in the bunkers further west.’

‘What do they say?’

‘That the virus is dying down.’

‘Then we could be out there again soon,’ said Ehrlen with relish. ‘If the Isstvanians come to take their city back, they’ll find us waiting for them.’

‘No,’ said Tarvitz. ‘There’s one more stage of the viral attack still to come.’

‘What’s that?’ demanded Ehrlen.

‘The firestorm,’ said Tarvitz.

‘Y
OU SEE NOW
,’ said Horus to the assembled remembrancers. ‘This is war. This is cruelty and death. This is what we do for you and yet you turn your face from it.’

Weeping men and women clung to one another in the wake of such monstrous genocide, unable to comprehend the scale of the slaughter that had just been enacted in the name of the Imperium.

‘You have come to my ship to chronicle the Great Crusade and there is much to be said for what you have achieved, but things change and times move on,’ continued Horus as the Astartes warriors along the flanks of the chamber closed the doors and stood before them with their bolters held across their chests.

‘The Great Crusade is over,’ said Horus, his voice booming with power and strength. ‘The ideals it once stood for are dead and all we have fought for has been a lie. Until now. Now I will bring the Crusade back to its rightful path and rescue the galaxy from its abandonment at the hands of the Emperor.’

Astonished gasps and wails spread around the chamber at Horus’s words and he relished the freedom he felt in saying them out loud. The need for secrecy and misdirection was no more. Now he could unveil the grandeur of his designs for the galaxy and cast aside his false facade to reveal his true purpose.

‘You cry out, but mere mortals cannot hope to comprehend the scale of my plans,’ said Horus, savoring the looks of panic that began to spread around the audience chamber.

No iterator could ever have had a crowd so completely in the palm of his hand.

‘Unfortunately, this means that there is no place for the likes of you in this new crusade. I am to embark on the greatest war ever unleashed on the galaxy, and I cannot be swayed from my course by those who harbor disloyalty.’ Horus smiled.

The smile of an angelic executioner. ‘Kill them,’ he said. ‘All of them.’

Bolter fire stabbed into the crowd at the Warmaster’s order. Flesh burst in wet explosions and a hundred bodies fell in the first fusillade. The screaming began as the crowd surged away from the Astartes who marched into their midst. But there was no escape. Guns blazed and roaring chainswords rose and fell.

The slaughter took less than a minute and Horus turned away from the killing to watch the final death throes of Isstvan III. Abaddon emerged from the shadows where he and Maloghurst had watched the slaughter of the remembrancers.

‘My lord,’ said Abaddon, bowing low.

‘What is it, my son?’

‘Ship surveyors report that the virus has mostly burned out.’

‘And the gaseous levels?’

‘Off the scale, my lord,’ smiled Abaddon. ‘The gunners await your orders.’

Horus watched the swirling, noxious clouds enveloping the planet below.

All it would take was a single spark.

He imagined the planet as the frayed end of a fuse, a fuse that would ignite the galaxy in a searing conflagration and would lead to an inexorable conclusion on Terra.

‘Order the guns to fire,’ said Horus, his voice cold. ‘Let the galaxy burn!’

‘E
MPEROR PRESERVE US
,’ whispered Moderati Cassar, unable to hide his horror and not caring who heard him. The miasma of rancid, putrid gasses still hung thickly around the Titan and he could only dimly see the trenches again, along with the Death Guard emerging from the bunkers. Shortly after the order to seal the Titan had been given, the Death Guard had taken cover, clearly in receipt of the same order as the
Dies Irae
.