Eye of Terra Page 5

  ‘And this is it?’ asked Horus, leaning over the glowing holo­lith. First one, then dozens, and finally hundreds of worlds were outlined in green.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Emperor. ‘This is Ullanor.’

  Aurelian

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ~ Dramatis Personae ~

  The Primarchs

  Lorgar Aurelian, Primarch of the Word Bearers

  Fulgrim, Primarch of the Emperor’s Children

  Angron, Primarch of the World Eaters

  Horus Lupercal, Primarch of the Sons of Horus

  Perturabo, Primarch of the Iron Warriors

  Alpharius Omegon, Primarch of the Alpha Legion

  Magnus the Red, Primarch of the Thousand Sons

  Konrad Curze, Primarch of the Night Lords

  Mortarion, Primarch of the Death Guard

  The Word Bearers Legion

  Argel Tal, Lord of the Gal Vorbak

  Kor Phaeron, Captain, First Company

  The Emperor’s Children Legion

  Damaras Axalian, Captain, Twenty-ninth Company

  Inhabitants of the Great Eye

  Ingethel the Ascended, Viator of the Primordial Truth

  An’ggrath the Unbound, Guardian of the Throne of Skulls

  Kairos Fateweaver, Oracle of Tzeentch

  ‘Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.’

  – Ancient Terran proverb

  ‘I wish, with every fibre of my soul, that I had killed him when I had the chance. That momentary flicker of disbelief and sorrow, that second’s hesitation for the abhorrence of fratricide, cost us more than anyone can measure. Horus leads the Legions into heresy, but Lorgar is the cancer in the Warmaster’s core.’

  – The Primarch Corax

  ‘All I ever wanted was the truth. Remember those words as you read the ones that follow. I never set out to topple my father’s kingdom of lies from a sense of misplaced pride. I never wanted to bleed the species to its marrow, reaving half the galaxy clean of human life in this bitter crusade. I never desired any of this, though I know the reasons for which it must be done.

  But all I ever wanted was the truth.’

  – Opening lines of the Book of Lorgar,

  First Canticle of Chaos

  PROLOGUE

  HERALD OF THE ONE GOD

  Colchis

  Many years ago

  The archpriest watched from the cathedral window as his city burned below.

  ‘We should do something.’

  His voice was a bass rumble, yet edged by a softness that smoothed his words into something almost delicate. His was a voice made to reason, to question, to reassure – not to scream and froth and rage.

  The archpriest turned from the window. ‘Father? When will the fires stop burning?’

  Kor Phaeron walked across the chamber, his wizened scowl deep-set on his face, like a scar cut into old leather. He busied himself with the scrolls on the central table, his thin lips moving as he read each one in turn.

  ‘Father? We cannot remain here while the city burns. We must help the people.’

  ‘You have not spoken since we claimed the Cathedral of Illumination.’ The ageing man glanced over for the merest moment. ‘And your first words after winning this war are to ask when the fires will be drowned? You have just conquered a world, boy. You have greater matters to concern yourself with.’

  The archpriest was a young man, beautiful in a way that transcended notions of physical attraction. His tan skin gleamed with tiny tattoos of gold-inked scripture. His eyes were dark without being cold, and he could spend days without smiling, yet never seem sinister.

  He turned back to the window. In his mind’s eye, he’d always pictured the crusade’s end in this very place, the avenues of the City of Grey Flowers flooded by cheering crowds, their joyous prayers reaching into the skies, shaking the slender towers of their former rulers.

  The reality didn’t quite approach it. The streets were crowded, that much was true, but crowded with rioters, looters and clashing bands of robed warriors, as the last lingering remnants of the Covenant’s defenders fought to the last against the tide of invaders.

  ‘So much of the city is still aflame,’ the archpriest said. ‘We must do something.’

  Kor Phaeron murmured to himself as he read the tattered parchments.

  ‘Father.’ The archpriest turned again, watching the older priest discard another scroll.

  ‘Hmm? What is it, boy?’

  ‘Half of the city is ablaze. We must do something.’

  Kor Phaeron smiled, the expression ugly but not unkind. ‘You must prepare for your coronation, Lorgar. The Covenant has fallen, and the Old Ways will be cast down as blasphemy against the One God. You are no longer merely Archpriest of the Godsworn, you are the Archpriest of all Colchis. I have given you a world.’

  The golden figure turned back to the window, eyes narrowed. Something crept into his voice then, something rigid and cold, a foreshadowing of all that would be in the centuries to come.

  ‘I do not wish to rule,’ he said.

  ‘That will change, my son. It will change when you see that no one else around you is as fit to rule as you are. In a moment of realisation, it will change out of your own selfless need. That is how it always works for men of power. The road to every throne is paved with good intentions.’

  Lorgar shook his head. ‘I wish for nothing more than our people to see the truth.’

  ‘The truth is power.’ The other priest went back to the scrolls. ‘The ignorant and the weak must be dragged into the light, no matter the cost. It doesn’t matter how many bleed and cry out on the way.’

  Lorgar watched his new city burn, seeing his followers slaughter the last of the Old Ways’ blasphemers in the streets below.

  ‘I know I have asked so many times before,’ he said softly, ‘but does it not give you pause, even as the crusade ends? You once believed as they do.’

  ‘I still believe as they do.’ Kor Phaeron gave an assured smile. ‘But I believe as you do, as well. I keep to my old faith that there are many gods, Lorgar. Your One God is simply the most powerful.’

  ‘He will come to us soon.’ The archpriest looked to the darkening sky. Colchis was a thirsty world, and rainclouds rarely made a call in the heavens. ‘Perhaps a year from now, but no longer. I have seen it in my dreams. On the day he arrives, his vessel will descend through a storm.’

  Kor Phaeron came closer, resting his hand on the taller man’s forearm. ‘When your One God comes, we will see if I was right to believe you.’

  Lorgar was still staring up at the blue sky, watching it become choked by the rising smoke from the burning city. He smiled at his mentor’s words.

  ‘Have faith, father.’

  Kor Phaeron smiled then. ‘I have always had faith, my son. Have you ever dreamed this god’s name? The masses will ask for it, soon enough. I cannot help but wonder what you will tell them.’

  ‘I do not believe he has a name.’ Lorgar closed his eyes. ‘We will know him only as the Emperor.’

  Part One

  THE SEVENTEENTH SON

  ONE

  FRATERNITY

  The Vengeful Spirit

  Four days after Isstvan V

  Eight of his brothers were present, though only half of them truly stood in the room. The absent four were nothing more than projections: three of them manifested around the table in the forms of flickering grey hololithic simulacra, formed of stuttering light and white noise. The fourth of them appeared as a brighter image comprised of silver radiance, its features and limbs dripping spiral lashes of corposant witchfire. This last projection, Magnus, inclined its head in greeting.

  Hail, Lorgar,+ his brother bred the words within his mind.
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  Lorgar nodded in return. ‘How far away are you, Magnus?’

  The Crimson King’s psychic projection showed no emotion. A tall man, his head crested by a sculpted crown, Magnus the Red refused to make contact using his one remaining eye.

  Very far. I lick my wounds on a distant world. It has no name but that which I brought to it.+

  Lorgar nodded, not blind to the nuances of hesitation in his brother’s silent tones. Now was not the time for such talk.

  The others acknowledged him one by one. Curze – a cadaverous, pulsing hololithic avatar of himself, gave the barest suggestion of a nod. Mortarion, an emaciated wraith even in the flesh, was hardly improved by this electronic etherealness. His image faded in and out of focus, occasionally dividing in the bizarre mitosis of distance distortion. He lowered the blade of his Manreaper scythe in greeting, which was in itself a warmer hail than Lorgar had been expecting.

  Alpharius was the last of those present through long-range sending. He stood helmed, while all others were bareheaded, and his hololithic image was stable while each of the others suffered corruption from the vast ranges between their fleets. Alpharius, almost a head shorter than his brothers, stood scaled in crocodilian resplendence, his reptile-skin armour plating glinting in the false light of his manifestation. His salute was the sign of the aquila, the Emperor’s own symbol, made with both hands across his breastplate.

  Lorgar snorted. How quaint.

  ‘You’re late,’ one of his brothers interrupted. ‘We’ve been waiting.’ The voice was a graceless avalanche of syllables.

  Angron. Lorgar turned to him, dispensing with any attempt at a conciliatory smile.

  His warrior brother stood hunched in the threatening lean that characterised his body language, the back of his skull malformed from the brutal neural implants hammered into the bone and wired into the soft tissue of his brainstem. Angron’s bloodshot eyes narrowed as another pulse of pain ransacked through his nervous system – a legacy of the aggression enhancers surgically imposed upon him by his former masters. While the other primarchs had risen to rule the worlds they’d been cast down upon, only Angron had languished in captivity, a slave to techno-primitives on some forsaken backwater world that had never deserved a name. Angron’s past still ran through his blood, nerve pain sparking in his muscles with every misfired synapse.

  ‘I was delayed,’ Lorgar admitted. He didn’t like to look at his brother for too long at a time. It was one of the things that made Angron twitch; like an animal, the lord of the World Eaters couldn’t abide being stared at, and could never hold eye contact for more than a few moments. Lorgar had no desire to provoke him.

  Kor Phaeron had once made mention that the World Eater’s face was a sneering mask made of clenched knuckles, but Lorgar found no humour in it. To his eyes, his brother was a cracked statue: features that should have been composed and handsome were wrenched into a jagged, snarling expression, flawed by muscle twinges that bordered on spasms. It was easy to see why others believed Angron always looked on the edge of fury. In truth, he looked like a man struggling to concentrate through epileptic agony. Lorgar hated the bleak, crude bastard, but it was hard not to admire his unbreakable endurance.

  Angron grunted something wordless and dismissive, looking back at the others.

  ‘It has been nine days, and we know our tasks,’ he growled. ‘We are already spread across the void. Why did you gather us?’

  Horus, Warmaster of the cleaved Imperium, didn’t answer immediately. He gestured for Lorgar to take his place around the table, at Horus’ own right hand. Unlike his Legion’s sea-green ceramite, Horus stood clad in layered, dense armour of charcoal black, adorned with the glaring cadmium Eye of Terra on his breastplate. This last sigil, the symbol of his authority as master of the Imperium’s armies, had its black core refashioned into a slitted serpent’s pupil. Lorgar wondered, as he met Horus’ pale, elegant smirk, just what secrets Erebus had been whispering into the Warmaster’s ears in recent months.

  Lorgar took his place between Horus and Perturabo. The former presided at the head of the table, all pretence of equality done away with in the aftermath of Isstvan. The latter stood in his burnished, riveted war plate, leaning on the haft of an immense hammer with an admirable air of casual disregard.

  ‘Lorgar,’ Perturabo murmured in greeting. Two-dozen power cables of various thicknesses plugged directly into the Iron Warrior’s bare head, even at the jawline and temples, linking him to the internal processes of his gunmetal-grey armour. Chains draped over the tiered plating rattled as he gave a cursory nod.

  Lorgar returned it, but said nothing. His dark eyes drifted across the others, seeking his last brother.

  ‘So.’ Horus’ indulgent smile was all teeth. ‘We have gathered again, at last.’

  All eyes fell upon him, except for Lorgar’s. The seventeenth son’s distraction went unmarked as Horus continued.

  ‘This gathering is the first of its kind. Here, now, we unite in one another’s presence for the first time.’

  ‘We gathered on Isstvan,’ Angron grunted.

  ‘Not all of us.’ Alpharius’ colourless hololithic image still hadn’t turned its helmeted face. The projection’s voice held little in the way of corruption-crackle, and just as little emotion.

  The nine Legions had scattered after Isstvan. With a galaxy to conquer and great armies to raise on the long road to Terra, the Legions loyal to Warmaster Horus broke apart into the void, boosting away from a world left dead in their wake.

  Angron narrowed his eyes, as if fighting to remember. He nodded agreement a moment later. ‘True. Lorgar refused to come. He was praying.’

  Horus, his handsome features lit from the low glow of his gorget, offered a smile. ‘He was meditating on his place in our great plan. There is a difference, brother.’

  Angron nodded again without really committing to agreement. He seemed to care for nothing but shrugging the conversation from his shoulders and moving on to other matters.

  Horus spoke up again. ‘We all know the costs of the coming campaign, and our destinies within it. Our fleets are underway. But after the, shall we say, unpleasantness of Isstvan, this is the first time we have gathered as a full fraternity.’ Horus gestured with an open palm to his golden-skinned brother. Intentionally or not, the movement was threatening when made with the massive clawed Mechanicum talon sheathing his right hand. ‘I hope your meditations were worthwhile, Lorgar.’

  Lorgar was still staring at his final brother. He’d not taken his eyes off the last figure since he’d looked away from Perturabo.

  ‘Lorgar?’ Horus almost growled now. ‘I am growing ever more weary of your inability to adhere to established planning.’

  Curze’s chuckle was a vulture’s caw. Even Angron smiled, his scarred lips peeling back from several replacement iron teeth.

  Lorgar slowly, slowly reached for the ornate crozius mace on his back. As he drew the weapon in the company of his closest kin, his eyes remained locked on one of them, and all physically present felt the deepening chill of psychic frost riming along their armour.

  The Word Bearer’s voice left his lips in an awed, vicious whisper.

  ‘You. You are not Fulgrim.’

  TWO

  BLOOD AT THE COUNCIL TABLE

  Time changes all things.

  The son that had never found a place in his father’s empire was not the same soul that drew his weapon now. Lorgar was already moving before even the keenest of his warrior brothers knew what was happening.

  Fulgrim had a scarce moment to draw a breath, to instinctively reach for his own weapon in a futile attempt to ward the coming blow.

  Lorgar’s crozius mace struck with a bell’s toll, echoing around the war room. Fulgrim crashed into the back wall – a porcelain doll in shattered ceramite – and crumpled to the ground.

  The golden primarch turne
d his fierce eyes upon his other brothers. ‘That is not Fulgrim.’

  The others were already advancing, drawing their own weapons. Lorgar’s crimson armour, painted in honour of his Legion’s treachery against the Throne, reflected the stuttering hololithic avatars of the four brothers present only in spirit.

  ‘Stay back,’ he warned those that still advanced upon him, ‘and heed my words. That wretch, that thing, is not our brother.’

  ‘Peace, Lorgar.’ Horus approached, his own armour joints purring with low snarls. In times past, the merest threat of a confrontation had been enough to quell Lorgar from any rash action. He’d scarcely ever spoken a harsh word to any of his brothers, nor had he ever relished the many times they’d rebuked him for his perceived flaws. Unnecessary conflict was anathema to him.

  As they faced him now, even Horus was wide-eyed in the changes wrought since Isstvan. The Word Bearers primarch clutched his maul in both red gauntlets, defying his brothers with narrowed eyes. In the voice of a poet turned to hate, he warned ‘Stay back,’ a second time.

  ‘Lorgar.’ Horus lowered his voice, softening it to match his brother’s. ‘Peace, Lorgar. Peace.’

  ‘You already knew.’ Lorgar almost laughed. ‘I see it in your eyes, brother. What have you done?’

  Horus gave a brittle smile. This had to end now. ‘Magnus,’ he said.

  The psychic projection of Magnus the Red shook its crested head. ‘I am on the other side of the galaxy, Horus. Do not ask me to contain our brother. Keep order on your own flagship.’

  Fulgrim moaned as he began to rise from the decking. Blood made lightning trails down his face from the edges of his lips. Lorgar rested an armoured boot on the prone primarch’s chestplate.

  ‘Stay down,’ he said, without looking at Fulgrim.

  Fulgrim’s pale, androgynous features twisted in false amusement. ‘You think you–’

  ‘If you speak,’ Lorgar kept his boot on the fallen primarch, ‘I will destroy you.’