Horus Rising (34 page)

‘Lay them low,’ Torgaddon ordered. Moy nodded and began to gather munitions. ‘Find Captain Tarvitz,’ Torgaddon called. ‘He’ll show you how to do it.’

L
OKEN REMAINED ON
the strategium for the first three hours after the drop, long enough to celebrate Torgaddon’s signal from the surface. The speartip had secured the drop-site, and formed up with the residue of Lord Eidolon’s company. After that, the atmosphere had become, strangely, more tense. They were waiting to hear Torgaddon’s field decision. Abaddon, cautious and closed, had already ordered stormbirds prepped for extraction flights. Aximand paced, silently. The Warmaster had withdrawn into his sanctum with Maloghurst.

Loken leant at the strategium rail for a while, overlooking the bustle of the vast bridge below, and discussed tactics with Tybalt Marr. Marr and Moy were both sons of Horus, cast in his image so firmly that they looked like identical twins. At some point in the Legion’s history, they had earned the nicknames ‘the Either’ and the ‘the Or’, referring to the fact that they were almost interchangeable. It was often hard to distinguish between them, they were so alike. One might do as well as the other.

Both were competent field officers, with a rack of victories each that would make any captain proud, though neither had attained the glories of Sedirae or Abaddon. They were precise, efficient and workmanlike in their leadership, but they were Luna Wolves, and what was workmanlike to that fraternity was exemplary to any other regiment.

As Marr spoke, it became clear to Loken that he was envious of his ‘twin’s’ selection to the undertaking. It was Horus’s habit to send both or neither. They worked well together, complementing one another, as if somehow anticipating one another’s decisions, but the ballot for the speartip had been democratic and fair. Moy had won a place. Marr had not.

Marr rattled on to Loken, evidently sublimating his worries about his brother’s fate. After a while, Qruze came over to join them at the rail.

Iacton Qruze was an anachronism. Ancient and rather tiresome, he had been a captain in the Legion since its inception, his prominence entirely eclipsed once Horus had been repatriated and given command by the Emperor. He was the product of another era, a throwback to the years of the Unification Wars and the bad old times, stubborn and slightly cantankerous, a vestigial trace of the way the Legion had gone about things in antiquity.

‘Brothers,’ he greeted them as he came up. Qruze still had a habit, perhaps unconscious, of making the salute of the single clenched fist against his breast, the old pro-Unity symbol, rather than the double-handed eagle. He had a long, tanned face, deeply lined with creases and folds, and his hair was white. He spoke softly, expecting others to make the effort to listen, and believed that it was his quiet tone that had, over the years, earned him the nickname ‘the Half-Heard’.

Loken knew this wasn’t so. Qruze’s wits were not as sharp as they’d once been, and he often appeared tired or inappropriate in his commentary or advice. He was known as ‘the Half-Heard’ because his pronouncements were best not listened to too closely.

Qruze believed he stood as a wise father-figure to the Legion, and no one had the spite to inform him otherwise. There had been several quiet attempts to deprive him of company command, just as Qruze had made several attempts to become elected to the first captaincy.

By duration of service, he should have been so long since. Loken believed that the Warmaster regarded Qruze with some pity and couldn’t abide the idea of retiring him. Qruze was an irksome relic, regarded by the rest of them with equal measures of affection and frustration, who could not accept that the Legion had matured and advanced without him.

‘We will be out of this in a day,’ he announced categorically to Loken and Marr. ‘You mark my words, young men. A day, and the commander will order extraction.’

‘Tarik is doing well,’ Loken began.

‘The boy Torgaddon has been lucky, but he cannot press this to a conclusion. You mark my words. In and out, in a day.’

‘I wish I was down there,’ Marr said.

‘Foolish thoughts,’ Qruze decided. ‘It’s only a rescue run. I cannot for the life of me imagine what the Emperor’s Children thought they were doing, going into this hell. I served with them, in the early days, you know? Fine fellows. Very proper. They taught the Wolves a thing or two about decorum, thank you very much! Model soldiers. Put us to shame on the Eastern Fringe, so they did, but that was back then.’

‘It certainly was,’ said Loken.

‘It most certainly was,’ agreed Qruze, missing the irony entirely. ‘I can’t imagine what they thought they were doing here.’

‘Prosecuting a war?’ Loken suggested.

Qruze looked at him diffidently. ‘Are you mocking me, Garviel?’

‘Never, sir. I would never do that.’

‘I hope we’re deployed,’ Marr grumbled, ‘and soon.’

‘We won’t be,’ Qruze declared. He rubbed the patchy grey goatee that decorated his long, lined face. He was most certainly not a son of Horus.

‘I’ve business to attend to,’ Loken said, excusing himself. ‘I’ll take my leave, brothers.’

Marr glared at Loken, annoyed to be left alone with the Half-Heard. Loken winked and wandered off, hearing Qruze embark on one of his long and tortuous ‘stories’ to Marr.

Loken went downship to the barrack decks of Tenth Company. His men were waiting, half-armoured, weapons and kit spread out for fitting. Apprenta and servitors manned portable lathes and forge carts, making final, precise adjustments to plate segments. This was just displacement activity: the men had been battle-ready for weeks.

Loken took the time to appraise Vipus and the other squad leaders of the situation, and then spoke briefly to some of the new blood warriors they’d raised to company service during the voyage. These men were especially tense. One Forty Twenty might see their baptism as full Astartes.

In the solitude of his arming chamber, Loken sat for a while, running through certain mental exercises designed to promote clarity and concentration. When he grew bored of them, he took up the book Sindermann had loaned him.

He’d read a good deal less of
The Chronicles of Ursh
during the voyage than he’d intended. The commander had kept him busy. He folded the heavy, yellowed pages open with ungloved hands and found his place.

The
Chronicles
were as raw and brutal as Sindermann had promised. Long-forgotten cities were routinely sacked, or burned, or simply evaporated in nuclear storms. Seas were regularly stained with blood, skies with ash, and landscapes were often carpeted with the bleached and numberless bones of the conquered. When armies marched, they marched a billion strong, the ragged banners of a million standards swaying above their heads in the atomic winds. The battles were stupendous maelstroms of blades and spiked black helms and baying horns, lit by the fires of cannons and burners. Page after page celebrated the cruel practices and equally cruel character of the despot Kalagann.

It amused Loken, for the most part. Fanciful logic abounded, as did an air of strained realism. Feats of arms were described that no pre-Unity warriors could have accomplished. These, after all, were the feral hosts of techno-barbarians that the proto-Astartes, in their crude thunder armour, had been created to bring to heel. Kalagann’s great generals, Lurtois and Sheng Khal and, later, Quallodon, were described in language more appropriate to primarchs. They carved, for Kalagann, an impossibly vast domain during the latter part of the Age of Strife.

Loken had skipped ahead once or twice, and saw that later parts of the work recounted the fall of Kalagann, and described the apocalyptic conquest of Ursh by the forces of Unity. He saw passages referring to enemy warriors bearing the thunderbolt and lightning emblem, which had been the personal device of the Emperor before the eagle of the Imperium was formalised. These men saluted with the fist of unity, as Qruze still did, and were clearly arrayed in thunder armour. Loken wondered if the Emperor himself would be mentioned, and in what terms, and wanted to look to see if he could recognise the names of any of the proto-Astartes warriors.

But he felt he owed it to Kyril Sindermann to read the thing thoroughly, and returned to his original place and order. He quickly became absorbed by a sequence detailing Shang Khal’s campaigns against the Nordafrik Conclaves. Shang Khal had assembled a significant horde of irregular levies from the southern client states of Ursh, and used them to support his main armed strengths, including the infamous Tupelov Lancers and the Red Engines, during the invasion.

The Nordafrik technogogues had preserved a great deal more high technology for the good of their conclaves than Ursh possessed, and sheer envy, more than anything, motivated the war. Kalagann was hungry for the fine instruments and mechanisms the conclaves owned.

Eight epic battles marked Shang Khal’s advance into the Nordafrik zones, the greatest of them being Xozer. Over a period of nine days and nights, the war machines of the Red Engines blasted their way across the cultivated agroponic pastures and reduced them back to the desert from which they had originally been irrigated and nurtured. They cut through the laser thorn hedges and the jewelled walls of the outer conclave, and unleashed dirty atomics into the heart of the ruling zone, before the Lancers led a tidal wave of screaming berserkers through the breach into the earthly paradise of the gardens at Xozer, the last fragment of Eden on a corrupted planet.

Which they, of course, trampled underfoot.

Loken felt himself skipping ahead again, as the account bogged down in interminable lists of battle glories and honour rolls. Then his eyes alighted on a strange phrase, and he read back. At the heart of the ruling zone, a ninth, minor battle had marked the conquest, almost as an afterthought. One bastion had remained, the
murengon
, or walled sanctuary, where the last hierophants of the conclaves held out, practising, so the text said, their ‘sciomancy by the flame lyght of their burning realm’.

Shang Khal, wishing swift resolution to the conquest, had sent Anult Keyser to crush the sanctuary. Keyser was lord martial of the Tupelov Lancers and, by various bonds of honour, could call freely upon the services of the Roma, a squadron of mercenary fliers whose richly decorated interceptors, legend said, never landed or touched the earth, but lived eternally in the scope of the air. During the advance on the murengon, Keyser’s oneirocriticks – and by that word, Loken understood the text meant ‘interpreters of dreams’ – had warned of the hierophants’ sciomancy, and their phantasmagorian ways.

When the battle began, just as the oneirocriticks had warned, majiks were unleashed. Plagues of insects, as thick as monsoon rain and so vast in their swirling masses that they blacked out the sun, fell upon Keyser’s forces, choking air intakes, weapon ports, visors, ears, mouths and throats. Water boiled without fire. Engines overheated or burned out. Men turned to stone, or their bones turned to paste, or their flesh succumbed to boils and buboes and flaked off their limbs. Others went mad. Some became daemons and turned upon their own.

Loken stopped reading and went back over the sentences again, ‘…and where the plagueing insects did not crawl, or madness lye, so men did blister and recompose them ownselves onto the terrible likeness of daemons, such foul pests as the afreet and the d’genny that persist in the silent desert places. In such visage, they turned uponn their kin and gnawed then upon their bloody bones…’

Some became daemons and turned upon their own.

Anult Keyser himself was slain by one such daemon, which had, just hours previously, been his loyal lieutenant, Wilhym Mardol.

When Shang Khal heard the news, he flew into a fury, and went at once to the scene, bringing with him what the text described as his ‘wrathsingers’, who appeared to be magi of some sort. Their leader, or master, was a man called Mafeo Orde, and somehow, Orde drew the wrathsingers into a kind of remote warfare with the hierophants. The text was annoyingly vague about exactly what occurred next, almost as if it was beyond the understanding of the writer. Words such as ‘sorcery’ and ‘majik’ were employed frequency, without qualification, and there were invocations to dark, primordial gods that the writer clearly thought his audience would have some prior knowledge of. Since the start of the text, Loken had seen references to Kalagann’s ‘sorcerous’ powers, and the ‘invisibles artes’ that formed a key part of Ursh’s power, but he had taken them to be hyperbole. This was the first time sorcery had appeared on the page, as a kind of fact.

The earth trembled, as if afraid. The sky tore like silk. Many in the Urshite force heard the voices of the dead whispering to them. Men caught fire, and walked around, bathed in lambent flames that did not consume them, pleading for help. The remote war between the wrathsingers and the hierophants lasted for six days, and when it ended, the ancient desert was thick with snow, and the skies had turned blood red. The air formations of the Roma had been forced to flee, lest their craft be torn from the heavens by screaming angels and dashed down upon the ground.

At the end of it, all the wrathsingers were dead, except Orde himself. The murengon was a smoking hole in the ground, its stone walls so hideously melted by heat they had become slips of glass. And the hierophants were extinct.

The chapter ended. Loken looked up. He had been so enthralled, he wondered if he had missed an alert or a summons. The arming chamber was quiet. No signal runes blinked on the wall panel.

He began to read the next part, but the narrative had switched to a sequence concerning some northern war against the nomadic caterpillar cities of the Taiga. He skipped a few pages, hunting for further mention of Orde or sorcery, but could detect none. Frustrated, he set the book aside.

Sindermann… had he given Loken this work deliberately? To what end? A joke? Some veiled message? Loken resolved to study it, section by section, and take his questions to his mentor.

But he’d had enough of it for the time being. His mind was clouded and he wanted it clear for combat. He walked to the vox plate beside the chamber door and activated it.