Eye of Terra Read online

  Backlist

  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

  Novellas

  PROMETHEAN SUN

  AURELIAN

  BROTHERHOOD OF THE STORM

  THE CRIMSON FIST

  PRINCE OF CROWS

  DEATH AND DEFIANCE

  TALLARN: EXECUTIONER

  BLADES OF THE TRAITOR

  THE PURGE

  THE HONOURED

  THE UNBURDENED

  SCORCHED EARTH

  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

  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

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

  Also available

  MACRAGGE’S HONOUR

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  The Horus Heresy

  The Wolf of Ash and Fire

  Aurelian

  Massacre

  Brotherhood of the Moon

  Inheritor

  Vorax

  Ironfire

  Red-Marked

  Master of the First

  Stratagem

  The Long Night

  Sins of the Father

  The Eagle’s Talon

  Iron Corpses

  The Final Compliance of Sixty-Three Fourteen

  The Herald of Sanguinius

  About the Authors

  An Extract from ‘I Am Slaughter’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  The Horus Heresy

  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 age of knowledge and enlightenment has ended.

  The Age of Darkness has begun.

  The Wolf of

  Ash and Fire

  Graham McNeill

  “A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.”

  – The Black Tacitus of Firenze

  “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

  – The Blind Poet of Kaerlundein

  ‘I was there,’ he would say, right up until the day he died, after which he spoke only infrequently. ‘I was there the day Horus saved the Emperor.’ It had been a singular moment, the Emperor and Horus shoulder to shoulder in the fiery, ash-choked depths of the scrapworld. Blood-lit in the broil of combat for almost the last time, though only one of them knew that.

  Father and son, back to back.

  Swords drawn and their foe all around.

  As perfect an encapsulation of the Crusade as any later immortalised in paint or ink.

  Before remembrance of such times became a thing to be feared.

  The scrapworld of Gorro; that was where it had happened, deep in junkyard space of the Telon Reach. The greenskin empire that once claimed dominion over its stars was in flames, assailed on all sides by the inexhaustible armies of the Imperium. The aliens’ empire was being overturned, their muddy fortress-worlds burning, but not quickly enough.

  Gorro was the key.

  Adrift in the distant light of a bloated red sun, where no planet had ever been wrought by inexorable time and gravity, it drifted on an erratic path. Not a wanderer, an intruder.

  Its destruction was made the Crusade’s highest priority.

  The command came from the hand of the Emperor himself, and his most favoured and brightest son answered this call to arms.

  Horus Lupercal, primarch of the Luna Wolves.

  Gorro wasn’t dying easy.

  Any expectation that this would be a swift strike to the heart was dashed the moment the Sixty-Third expedition surged towards the system boundary and saw the scale of the scrapfleet protecting it.

  Hundreds of vessels, pulled back from the fighting at the core of the Reach to defend its warlord’s planetoid citadel. Vast corpse-ships brought to hellish life with flaring plasma reactors at their heart. Warhulks welded together
from rusted wreckage scavenged from celestial graveyards and returned to life by hideous mechanical necromancy.

  Anchoring the fleet was a colossal, hollowed-out asteroid fortress, a mountainous rock encrusted with pig-iron and ice. Kilometres-wide engine cowlings were bolted deep into its bedrock and its craggy surface was thick with immense batteries of orbital-howitzers and mine-lobbers. It lumbered towards the Luna Wolves as rabid scrapship packs raced ahead like feral, club-wielding barbarians. The vox howled with baying static, a million tusked throats giving voice to the primal instinct of the ork.

  The engagement volume became a swirling free-fire zone, an impossibly tangled mass of entwined warships, collimated laser fire, parabolic torpedo contrails and explosive debris fields. Void-war engagements normally fought at ranges of tens of thousands of kilometres now began so close that ork marauders with crude rocket-packs were launching boarding actions.

  Atomic detonations fouled the space between the fleets with electromagnetic distortion and phantom echoes, making it almost impossible to separate what was real and what was a sensor ghost.

  The Vengeful Spirit was in the heart of the fiercest fighting, its flanks ablaze with broadsides. A hulk tumbled away, bludgeoned into molten submission by multiple decks of concentrated explosive ordnance. It trailed scads of burning fuels and arcing jets of plasma. Thousands of bodies spilled from its ruptured innards like spores from a fungal mass.

  There could be nothing subtle in such a fight. This wasn’t a battle of manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre, it was a brawl. It would be won by the fleet that punched hardest and most often.

  And right now, that was the orks.

  The Vengeful Spirit’s superstructure groaned like a living thing as it manoeuvred far faster than anything as massive should ever be asked. Its ancient hull shuddered under thunderous impacts, and the deck vibrated with the recoil of multiple broadside decks firing in unison.

  Space between the brawling fleets was thick with debris storms, atomic vortices, duelling attack squadrons and flash-burning vapour clouds, but within Lupercal’s flagship, discipline held firm.

  Cascading data-slates and shimmering wire-frame holos bathed the vaulted strategium in a rippling, undersea light. Hundreds of mortal voices conveyed the shipmaster’s orders, while chattering machine tickers recited damage reports, void strengths and ordnance firing schedules over the binary cant of Mechanicum priests.

  A well-drilled bridge crew in battle was a thing of beauty, and were it not for the caged-wolf pacing of Ezekyle Abaddon, Sejanus might have been properly able to appreciate it.

  The First Captain slammed a fist on the brass rim of a hololithic table displaying the engagement sphere. The scratchy, flickering threat vectors burped with angry static, but the grim picture of battle surrounding the Vengeful Spirit didn’t alter.

  Greenskin warships still vastly outnumbered those of the Luna Wolves, outgunning them and appearing – in defiance of all reason and sense – to be outmanoeuvring the commander.

  It was most vexing, and Ezekyle’s choler wasn’t helping.

  Nearby mortal crew, their faces limned by data-light, turned at the sudden sound, but looked away as the First Captain glared at them.

  ‘Really, Ezekyle?’ said Sejanus. ‘That’s your solution?’

  Ezekyle shrugged, making the plates of his armour grate together and the gleaming black of his topknot shake like a shaman’s fetish switch. Ezekyle loomed, it was his thing, and he tried to loom over Sejanus as though he actually thought he could intimidate him. Ridiculous, as it was only the topknot that made him taller.

  ‘I suppose you have a better idea of how to turn this disaster around, Hastur?’ said Ezekyle, glancing over his shoulder and careful to keep his voice low.

  The pale ivory of Ezekyle’s armour gleamed in the light of the strategium. Faded gang markings survived on those plates that hadn’t been replaced by the armourers, faded gold and tarnished silver. Sejanus sighed. Almost two hundred years since leaving Cthonia, and Ezekyle still held onto a heritage best left in the past.

  He gave Abaddon his best grin. ‘I do, as it turns out.’

  That got the attention of his other Mournival brothers.

  Horus Aximand, so like the commander with his high, aquiline features and sardonic curl of the lip that they called him the truest of the true sons. Or, if Aximand was in one of his rare, lighter moods, Little Horus.

  Tarik Torgaddon, the idiot joker whose dark, saturnine features had avoided the transhuman flattening common among the Emperor’s legionaries. Where Aximand would puncture the humour of any given moment, Torgaddon would seize upon it like a hound with a bone.

  Brothers all. The confraternity of four. Counsellors, war-brothers, naysayers and confidantes. So close to Horus, they were likened unto his sons.

  Tarik gave a mock bow, as though to the Emperor himself, and said, ‘Then please enlighten us poor, foolish mortals who are grateful merely to bask in the radiance of your genius.’

  ‘At least Tarik knows his place,’ grinned Sejanus, his finely sculpted features robbing the comment of malice.

  ‘So what is your better idea?’ said Aximand, cutting to the heart of the matter.

  ‘Simple,’ said Sejanus, turning to the command station behind them on a raised dais. ‘We trust in Horus.’

  The commander saw them coming and raised a gauntlet in welcome. His perfect face was all finely chiselled lines, piercing ocean-green eyes flecked with amber and freighted with aquiline intelligence.

  He towered over them all, the broad sweep of his shoulder guards swathed in the pelt of a giant beast slain on Davin’s plains many decades ago. His armour, white-gold even in the battle light of the strategium, was a thing wrought from wonder and beauty, with a single staring eye fashioned across the breastplate. Graven across its vambraces and pauldrons were armourers’ marks, the eagle and lightning bolt of Lupercal’s father, esoteric symbolism that Sejanus didn’t recognise and, almost hidden in the shadows of overlapping plates, hand-scratched gang markings from Cthonia.

  Sejanus hadn’t noticed them before, but that was the commander for you. Each time you stood in his presence you saw something fresh to delight the eye, some new reason to love him more.

  ‘So how do you think it’s going so far?’ asked Horus.

  ‘I have to be honest, sir,’ replied Tarik. ‘I feel the hand of the ship on me.’

  Lupercal smiled. ‘You don’t have faith in me? I’d be hurt if I didn’t know you were joking.’

  ‘I am?’ said Tarik.

  Horus turned his gaze away as the strategium shook with a pounding series of percussive impacts on the hull. Shells from the many guns of the asteroid fortress, judged Sejanus.

  ‘And you, Ezekyle?’ said Horus. ‘I know I can rely on you to give me a straight answer and not fall back on superstition.’

  ‘I have to agree with Torgaddon,’ said Ezekyle, and Sejanus suppressed a grin, knowing that admission would have cost Ezekyle dearly. Tarik and Ezekyle were so alike in war, but polar opposites when the killing was done. ‘We’re going to lose this fight.’

  ‘Have you ever known me to lose a fight?’ the commander asked of his namesake. Sejanus saw the imperceptible tilt at the corner of Lupercal’s lips and knew the commander had engineered the First Captain’s answer.

  Horus Aximand shook his head. ‘Never, and you never will.’

  ‘A flattering answer, but a wrong one. I am as capable of losing a fight as any other,’ said Horus, putting up a hand to forestall their inevitable denials. ‘But I’m not going to lose this one.’

  Lupercal ushered them to his command station, where what looked like a skeletal armature of gold and steel with embedded portions of pale meat stood plugged into the main battle hololith.

  ‘Adept Regulus,’ said Horus. ‘Illuminate my sons.’

  The emissary of the Mechanicum
nodded and the hololith bloomed to life. The commander’s station gave a clearer rendition of the battle, but, if anything, that only made his current orders more confounding.

  The hololith’s low light shadowed the commander’s eye sockets while sheening the rest of his face in deep red. The impression was of an ancient chieftain squatting at a low-burning hearthfire in his wartent, gathering his generals on the eve of battle.

  ‘Hastur, you always had the best grip on void tactics,’ said Horus. ‘Take a look and tell me what you see.’

  Sejanus leaned over the hololithic plotter, his heart swelling in pride at Lupercal’s words. It took an effort of will not to puff his chest out like one of the III Legion peacocks. He took a deep breath and stared at the grainy, slowly-updating schemata of battle.

  The greenskins made war without subtlety, no matter in what arena the battle was fought. On land they came at you in a berserk horde, braying, foaming and smeared with faecal warpaint. In space their rad-spewing reaverhulks stormed into the fray with every gun-deck throwing out shells and atomic warheads with abandon.

  ‘Standard greenskin tactics, though I baulk at dignifying this mess with the term,’ said Sejanus, swaying as sequentially enacted orders from the commander’s station threw the Vengeful Spirit into a savage turn. Echoes of crashing detonations travelled through the flagship’s structure. Whether they were impacts or outgoing fire was impossible to tell.

  ‘Their sheer force and numbers is bending our line back on itself,’ he continued, as Regulus shifted the focus of the hololith to highlight the fiercest fighting. ‘The centre is retreating from that asteroid fortress, we just don’t have the guns to hurt it.’

  ‘What else?’ said Horus.

  Sejanus pointed to the slowly rotating image. ‘Our right and upper quadrants are being pushed out too far. The left and lower quadrants are the only ones holding firm.’

  ‘What I wouldn’t give for another fleet,’ said Tarik, nodding at an empty region of space in an upper quadrant of the volume. ‘Then we’d have them on two flanks.’

  ‘No use wishing for what we don’t have,’ said Little Horus.

  Something wasn’t right, and it took a moment for the suspicion to crystallise fully in Sejanus’ mind.