The Burden of Loyalty 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

  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

  More tales from the Horus Heresy...

  CYBERNETICA

  SONS OF THE FORGE

  WOLF KING

  PROMETHEAN SUN

  AURELIAN

  BROTHERHOOD OF THE STORM

  THE CRIMSON FIST

  PRINCE OF CROWS

  DEATH AND DEFIANCE

  TALLARN: EXECUTIONER

  SCORCHED EARTH

  BLADES OF THE TRAITOR

  THE PURGE

  THE HONOURED

  THE UNBURDENED

  RAVENLORD

  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

  WOLF HUNT

  HUNTER’S MOON

  THIEF OF REVELATIONS

  TEMPLAR

  ECHOES OF RUIN

  MASTER OF THE FIRST

  THE LONG NIGHT

  IRON CORPSES

  RAPTOR

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

  Also available

  MACRAGGE’S HONOUR

  A Horus Heresy graphic novel

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  The Horus Heresy

  The Thirteenth Wolf – Gav Thorpe

  Into Exile – Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Cybernetica – Rob Sanders

  Analyse/Interpret

  Formulate

  Implement

  Locate/Isolate

  Execute

  Reconfigure

  End of Line

  Ordo Sinister – John French

  The Heart of the Pharos – L J Goulding

  Wolf King – Chris Wraight

  The Blood-well

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  The Binary Succession – David Annandale

  Perpetual – Dan Abnett

  Afterword

  About the Authors

  An Extract from ‘Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix’

  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 Thirteenth Wolf

  Gav Thorpe

  Aboard the Stormbird Clawrend, the Old Guard of the Thirteenth Great Company shared a poignant silence. The growl of plasma jets and wind from the thickening atmosphere shook the hull around them. Bulveye stared at each of his veterans in turn, and met their gazes with his own knowing look.

  They were armoured in bulky war-plate of storm-grey, gilded and silvered, decked with trophies, medallions and honours. Necklaces of alien fangs and bones hung about their gorgets, and their arms were bound with iron torqs. Tatters of parchment – oaths of moment and honours from the Allfather Himself – marked them as heroes of a hundred wars.

  Each had been a grown man when the Imperium had rediscovered Fenris. Too old, they said. Too old to benefit from Great Russ’ gene-seed. Too old for the transformations.

  ‘Too tough to die, too stubborn to give up, eh?’ Bulveye grinned toothily. ‘We proved them wrong...’

  Halvdan, his single eye shadowed in the light of the troop compartment, asked a question of the Old Wolf. ‘Will we offer terms to Magnus?’

  Bulveye shook his head.

  ‘I asked that same question of the Wolf King himself. There is no chance of reconciliation. The sorceries of the Thousand Sons must be extinguished.’

  Ha
lvdan offered no argument. Ranulf nodded sombrely.

  ‘We are the Vlka Fenryka, brothers,’ Bulveye continued. ‘The Space Wolves, the Rout. We have come as the Allfather’s executioners, with a single purpose – to destroy a world, to annihilate its people and render its civilisation down to ashes. Prospero, home to the Thousand Sons, Legion of Magnus the Red, the Crimson King. Traitorous lord of a corrupt world. We are righteousness, and that cannot be held at bay.’

  Jurgen let out a short laugh. ‘Yet the power of Magnus protects his capital. Mass drivers and magma bombs have burned all the rest of Prospero, but Tizca still stands.’

  The others cursed their foes’ sorcerous ways, but Bulveye silenced them with a stern glare. ‘A Legion destroying another is a humbling matter,’ he reminded them. ‘We should take no joy from the destruction of our brothers. Be brutal and efficient, the Wolf King said, but do not glory in the fall of Magnus and his sons.’ He paused. A broad, toothy grin split his features. ‘But show no mercy either! The other Great Companies are already on the ground. We will have some catching up to do...’

  The hull started to rattle with the detonation of anti-aircraft fire, and the rush of wind grew louder and louder as the gunship descended.

  With a change of inertia that would have broken the spines of lesser men, the Stormbird fired its landing thrusters, forcing the Old Guard into their harnesses. Bulveye stroked the sealskin-bound haft of his single-bladed power axe, Eldingverfall – the storm’s strike.

  They landed, the gear hydraulics shrieking below them and the hull shuddering from the impact. Bulveye stood, hitting the activator for the assault ramp.

  The brightness and all-consuming roar of battle swept into the gunship. Bulveye lifted Eldingverfall, catching the ruddy light on its rune-etched blade, and raised his voice over the din. ‘Did you not think we would get our hands bloody today?’

  The fire of countless explosions reflected from the crystal pyramids of the city, the skies lit with pulses of red and blue and orange from incendiary shells, las and plasma.

  Regiments of scarlet-clad Prosperine Spireguard flowed down the roads and broad steps towards the Space Wolves. The defenders’ tanks and walkers followed, laying down a curtain of fire to meet the grey-armoured mass of legionaries surging through the capital.

  Crystal shards and molten metal rained as Bulveye of the Thirteenth led his company through the maze of streets and cloisters. The towering structures of the Syrianus Precincts were one of several anchors for the enemy’s defence of the inner city, and Russ had tasked Bulveye and his warriors with overpowering the Thousands Sons’ flank.

  Now the precincts burned beneath the fury of the Rout.

  Las-fire from the Spireguard sparked azure beams along colonnaded roads and scoured down from balconies and windows, and a tempest of bolt-rounds snarled and cracked in reply. Dreadnoughts covered the advance of the Thirteenth, their autocannons and heavy bolters raking swathes of destruction through the defenders of Tizca. Bolstered by their presence, Bulveye and his warriors pushed further into the city of the Thousand Sons.

  ‘Give no thought to retreat,’ the Old Wolf snarled. ‘We leave this place with our names recited in the rolls of victory, or in the laments of the lost. The Allfather has called on us, his wolf pack, again, and we will see His enemies torn apart to the last remnant. Give no quarter, for we can expect none in return.’

  It was not only physical forces and dimensions that broke the landscape. The pyramids and obelisks of Tizca gleamed with another power that distorted the heavens like a coruscating heat haze. Crimson lightning lashed down from the highest summits of glass and white metal, leaving shattered ceramite and fused flesh where they struck.

  Purple fire rained from tortured storm clouds that swirled about the pyramids, each burning droplet hissing as it smouldered through armour and seared into flesh. Plasma blasts and cannon fire screeched harmlessly from glimmering shields of unnatural power.

  Bulveye felt the psychic field prickling his skin even though clad head-to-foot in power armour, its ceramite plates no barrier to the otherworldly energies manipulated by the deviant Thousand Sons. Waves of sorcery, like a hot wind inside his flesh, were emanating from the cluster of domes and ziggurats towards which the Thirteenth Company advanced.

  Another psychic storm swept across Bulveye’s warriors, lacerating battleplate with its touch, churning exposed flesh down to the bone.

  Not one shout of pain or protest rose from the throats of the Space Wolves as they fell. Instead they roared their defiance of the Thousand Sons’ arcane powers and spat oaths of vengeance upon the traitors of Prospero.

  The Old Wolf pointed his axe at the tallest pyramid of the precincts, the temple-library’s glassy sides cracked and broken by artillery and tank shells that had penetrated the psychic force fields by weight of fire alone. Dark smoke issued from the many rents upon its reflective surface. Through the fume he could see a flickering corona as uncanny energies leaked from the pinnacle.

  ‘I’ll raise a feast of honour to the wolf-brother that slays the sorcerer within,’ he promised.

  It was Ranulf that answered first, over the vox. ‘Ahh, my name shall be toasted that night!’

  This was met by a chorus of good-natured jeers from the others. Jurgen in particular laughed loud and long.

  ‘And the Allfather Himself would come to pay His respects, no doubt!’ he jested. ‘But I’ll wager it is our own cyclops that strikes the final blow. As Russ will fell the one-eyed Crimson King, so Halvdan Bale-eye will chop down this upstart of a sorcerer. One eye for one eye. It is only fair.’

  But Halvdan said nothing, perhaps expecting a punch-line jibe that did not come. The vox fell quiet, leaving only the roar of guns and pounding of armoured feet.

  They were ancient fighters – hearthlords of Russ from before the coming of the Imperium, bound by a camaraderie longer than any normal lifetime. They were the heart of the Thirteenth Great Company, as well as the tip of its blade.

  As they advanced, they passed other groups of VI Legion warriors. Bulveye recognised the quick-eyed Asmund amongst them, surveying the path ahead.

  ‘Beware the sorceries of Magnus’ brood,’ Asmund urged him. The words might have seemed redundant, but he continued with a more precise warning. ‘This whole city is steeped in the power of the wyrd, Old Wolf. Illusion is a weapon as powerful as any bolt or blast.’

  ‘So, we can trust nothing we see or hear, Rune Priest?’

  ‘You can trust my words, and the strength of Russ!’

  The Space Wolves fired on the move, leaving the streets carpeted with hundreds of red-coated corpses as they pushed hard into the outer reaches of the precincts. Stormbirds and Thunderhawks scoured the broad avenues and plaza with battlecannon and lascannon fire. Bulveye and his company advanced past smouldering wrecks of fighting vehicles and armoured walkers.

  Though progress was swift, the lord of the Thirteenth Company knew better than to underestimate the task ahead. ‘Stay alert,’ he urged them. ‘Magnus’ warriors have yet to show themselves. Know that when their fury comes it will be fierce, and we must ride the storm together. Listen to my command. Fight as one.’

  ‘There is not a son of Prospero yet born to match the Rout,’ Halvdan’s reply growled across the vox-link, ‘even if there are any brave enough left amongst them to dare face us.’

  ‘Not if they were the Ten Thousand Sons would they casually confront the Bale-eye. Not if they have the wisdom they claim so proudly.’

  Jurgen was without mirth for a change. ‘The ravens feed on those that fall to the guns of cowards just the same.’

  Hard fighting delivered the Old Guard of the Thirteenth onto the steps of the inner sanctum, the last two hundred metres fought through a bloody melee. Like phalangites of ancient Terran history, Spireguard with melta-pikes formed lines sixteen deep across the streets leading to the library-templ
e, the tips of their weapons glowing like heated brands.

  Where they struck the plate of the charging Space Wolves, the long spears erupted with intense blasts of energy, piercing armour and snapping thickened bone.

  The Rune Priest Asmund called out to Bulveye once more. ‘These foes are real enough, Old Wolf, but the temple-pyramid burns with malefic power. The enemy that lies within is strong in the ways of the Broken Path. He shields himself and his followers from my gaze with a curtain of beguiling gold.’

  The sons of Russ hacked at their foes. Bulveye stepped into the breach of the phalanx, his plasma pistol annihilating the body of a Prosperine defender.

  ‘Press on! The skald’s scorn on the hindmost!’

  The press of bodies was thick, but such was the strength and bulk of the Space Marines that even the backswing of a weapon would crush a man’s skull, and they trampled over their close-packed foes like a stampede of wild beasts. Though some fell to the melta-pikes, such gaps were quickly filled with more eager warriors, cutting down all in reach so that not a foe was left to strike at them from behind.

  Ranulf was the first to break through and ascend the steps, others following swiftly towards the main doors of the pyramid. The great gate was flanked with tall statues of Magnus: cyclopean guards with arms crossed over their chests, a rod in one hand and a curved khopesh blade in the other.

  ‘Still they do not show themselves!’ Ranulf bellowed in frustration.

  The ground started to shake, vibrating as if to the footstep of some impossibly vast beast. Cracks ran down the steps, parting the stone to swallow legionaries and Spireguard alike, hellfire glowing from the depths as though they were fractures into the abyss itself.

  The entrance to the pyramid yawned wide, its two great doors swung outwards with a crack like thunder and a flare of white light. From the unnatural brightness emerged a column of Space Marines armoured in plate of dark red, edged with gold and silver.

  Bolter fire raked down the steps, the rapid crack-and-boom of propellant and detonations in perfect time to the step of the Thousand Sons legionaries. The fusillade struck attacker and Spireguard without favour, pranging from the armour of the former, tearing apart the latter. So precise and ruthless was the counter-attack that Bulveye had thought at first that automatons assailed his warriors. He saw also in that moment that to pause in the slightest would be disaster. If the Thousand Sons were to sweep the Space Wolves from the threshold of their citadel, they might well drive them out of the precincts entirely.