[Horus Heresy 12] - A Thousand Sons Read online

  The Horus Heresy

  A THOUSAND SONS

  all is dust…

  Horus Heresy - 12

  Graham McNeill

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  To Evan. One down, nine hundred and ninety-nine to go.

  The Horus Heresy

  It is a time of legend.

  Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade—the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

  The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.

  Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.

  First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superheroic beings who have led the Emperor’s armies of Space Marines in victory after victory. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation. The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

  Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.

  Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.

  As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test.

  ~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~

  The Thousand Sons

  Magnus the Red - Primarch of the Thousand Sons Legion

  The Corvidae

  Ahzek Ahriman - Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons

  Ankhu Anen - Guardian of the Great Library

  Amon - Captain of the 9th Fellowship, Equerry to the Primarch

  The Pyrae

  Khalophis - Captain of the 6th Fellowship

  Auramagma - Captain of the 8th Fellowship

  The Pavoni

  Hathor Maat - Captain of the 3rd Fellowship

  The Athanaeans

  Baleq Uthizaar - Captain of the 5th Fellowship

  The Raptora

  Phosis T’kar - Captain of the 2nd Fellowship

  Phael Toron - Captain of the 7th Fellowship

  The Primarchs

  Leman Russ - Primarch of the Space Wolves

  Lorgar - Primarch of the Word Bearers

  Mortarion - Primarch of the Death Guard

  Sanguinius - Primarch of the Blood Angels

  Fulgrim - Primarch of the Emperor’s Children

  The Space Wolves

  Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson - Lord of the 5th Company of Space Wolves

  Ohthere Wyrdmake - Rune Priest of the 5th Co. of Space Wolves

  The Custodes

  Constantin Valdor - Chief Custodian

  Amon - Custodian Guard

  Non-Space Marines

  Malcador - The Sigillite of Terra

  Kallista Eris - Historiographer

  Mahavastu Kallimakus - Scrivener Extraordinary to Magnus the Red

  Camille Shivani - Architectural Archeohistorian

  Lemuel Gaumon - Societal Behaviourist

  Yatiri - Leader of the Aghoru

  “The ancient knights’ quest for the grail, the alchemist’s search for the Stone of the Philosophers, all were part of the Great Work and are therefore endless. Success only opens up new avenues of brilliant possibility. Such a task is eternal and its joys without bounds; for the whole universe, and all its wonders… what is it but the infinite playground of the Crowned and Conquering Child, of the insatiable, the innocent, the ever-rejoicing heirs of the galaxy and eternity, whose name is Mankind?”

  —The Book of Magnus

  “The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.”

  —Ahzek Ahriman

  “The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself: ye, all which it inherits shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind!”

  —The Prophecy of Amon

  All is dust…

  How prophetic those words seem now.

  A wise man from ancient Terra said them, or words just like them. I wonder if he was gifted as I am. I say gifted, but with every passing day, I come to regard my powers as a curse.

  I look out from the top of my tower, over a landscape of madness and storms of impossible energies, and I remember reading those words in a crumbling book on Terra. Over the centuries, I read every one of the texts from the forgotten ages that filled the great libraries of Prospero, but I do not think I really understood them until today.

  I can feel him drawing near with every breath, every heartbeat.

  That I still have either is a miracle, especially now.

  He is coming to kill me, of course. I can feel his anger, his hurt pride and his great regret. The power he now has was unlooked for, unwanted and unnatural. Power is fleeting, some say, but not this power.

  Once acquired it can never be given back.

  His abilities are like nothing else wielded by man. He could kill me from the other side of the galaxy, but he will not. He needs to look me in the eye as he destroys me. It is his flaw, one of them at least, that he is honourable.

  He behaves to others as he expects to be treated.

  That was his undoing.

  I know what he thinks I have done. He thinks I have betrayed him, but I have not. Truly, I have not. None of our cabal betrayed him; we did everything we could to save our brothers.

  It has come to this, a father set to kill his favoured son.

  That is the greatest tragedy of the Thousand Sons. They will call us traitors, but such an irony will go unrecorded, even in the lost books of Kallimakus. We remain loyal, as we have always been.

  No one will believe that, not the Emperor, not our brothers, and especially not the wolves that are not wolves.

  History will say they unleashed the Wolves of Russ on us, but history will be wrong. They unleashed something far worse.

  I can hear him climbing the steps of my tower.

  He will think I have done this because of Ohrmuzd, and in a way he is right. But it is so much more than that.

  I have destroyed my Legion: The Legion I loved, the Legion that saved me. I have destroyed the Legion he tried to save, and when he kills me he will be right to do so.

  I deserve no less, and perhaps much more.

  Ah, but before he destroys me, I must tell you of our doom.

  Yet where to begin?

  There are no beginnings and no endings, especially upon worlds of the Great Ocean. Past, present and future are one, and time is a meaningless.

  So it must be arbitrary, this place where I begin.

  I will start with a mountain.

  The Mountain that Eats Men.

  BOOK ONE

  IN THE KINGDOM

  OF THE BLIND

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Mountain that Eats Men / Captains / Observers

  The Mountain had existed for tens of thousands of years, a rearing landmass of rock that had been willed into existence by forces greater than any living inhabitant of Aghoru could imagine. Though its people had no knowledge of geology, the titanic forces of orogenic movement, compressional energies and isostatic uplift, they knew enough to know that the Mountain was too vast, too m
onumental, to be a natural formation.

  Set in the heart of an undulating salt plain the ancients of the Aghoru claimed had once been at the bottom of an ocean, the Mountain rose to a height of nearly thirty kilometres, taller even than Olympus Mons, the great Fabricator’s forge on Mars.

  It dominated the blazing, umber sky, a graceful, soaring peak shaped like an incredible tomb, crafted for some ancient king, of magnificent, cyclopean scale. No regular lines formed the mountain, and no artifice of mankind had shaped its rugged flanks, but one look at the Mountain was enough to convince even the most diehard sceptic that it had been crafted by unnatural means.

  Nothing grew on its rocky sides, no plants, gorse or even the thinnest of prairie grasses. The earth surrounding the Mountain shimmered in the baking heat of the planet’s sun, which hung low on the horizon like an overripe fruit.

  Despite the heat, the rocks of the Mountain were cold to the touch, smooth and slick as though freshly raised from the depths of a black ocean. Sunlight abhorred its sides, its shadowed valleys, sunken grabens and sheared clefts dark and cold, as though it had been built atop some frozen geyser that seeped its icy chill into the rock by some strange, geological osmosis.

  Surrounding the rumpled skirts of the Mountain, scattered collections of raised stones, each taller than three men, were gathered in loose circles. Such monuments should have been towering achievements, incredible feats of engineering by a culture without access to mechanical lifting equipment, mass-reducing suspensor gear or the titanic engines of the Mechanicum. But in the face of the Mountain’s artificial origins they were primitive afterthoughts, specks against the stark, brooding immensity of its impossibility. On a world such as this, what force could raise a mountain?

  None of the many people gathered on Aghoru could answer that question, though some of the greatest, most inquisitive and brilliant minds bent their every faculty to answer it.

  To the Aghoru, the Mountain was the Axis Mundi of their world, a place of pilgrimage.

  To the warrior-scholars of the Thousand Sons, the Mountain and its people were a curiosity, a puzzle to be solved and, potentially, the solution to a riddle their glorious leader had sought to unlock for nearly two centuries.

  On one thing, both cultures agreed wholeheartedly. The Mountain was a place of the dead.

  “Can you see him?” asked the voice, distant and dreamlike.

  “No.”

  “He should be back by now,” pressed the voice, stronger now. “Why isn’t he back?”

  Ahriman descended through the Enumerations, feeling the psychic presence of the three Astartes gathered beneath the scarlet canopy of his pavilion with senses beyond the rudimentary ones nature had seen fit to gift him. Their potent psyches hummed through their flesh like chained thunder, that of Phosis T’kar tense and choleric, Hathor Maat’s lugubrious and rigidly controlled.

  Sobek’s aetheric field was a tiny candle next to the blazing suns they carried within them.

  Ahriman felt his subtle body mesh with his physical form, and opened his eyes. He broke the link with his Tutelary and looked up at Phosis T’kar. The sun was low, yet still powerfully bright, and he squinted against it, shielding his eyes from the reflected glare of sunlight from the salt flats.

  “Well?” demanded Phosis T’kar.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Aaetpio can see no farther than the deadstones.”

  “Nor can Utipa,” said Phosis T’kar, squatting on his haunches and flicking up puffs of salt dust with irritated thoughts. Ahriman felt each one like an electric spark in his mind. “Why can’t the Tutelaries see beyond them?”

  “Who knows?” asked Ahriman, more troubled than he cared to admit.

  “I thought you’d be able to see further. You’re Corvidae after all.”

  “That wouldn’t help here,” said Ahriman, rising smoothly from a cross-legged position, and dusting glittering salt crystals from the inscribed crimson plates of his armour. His body felt stiff, and it took a moment for muscle memory to reassert control of his limbs after a flight in the aether.

  “In any case,” he said, “I don’t think it would be wise to try on this world. The walls between us and the Great Ocean are thin, and there’s a lot of unchannelled energy here.”

  “You’re probably right,” agreed Phosis T’kar, sweat dripping down his shaven scalp along the line of an elliptical scar that ran from his crown to the nape of his neck. “You think that’s why we linger on this planet?”

  “Entirely likely,” said Ahriman. “There is power here, but the Aghoru have lived in balance for centuries without suffering any ill-effects or mutations. That has to be worth investigating.”

  “Indeed it is,” said Hathor Maat, apparently unaffected by the furnace heat. “There’s precious little else of interest on this parched rock. And I don’t trust the Aghoru. I think they’re hiding something. How does anyone live in a place like this for so long without any signs of mutation?”

  Ahriman noted the venom with which his fellow captain spat the last word. Unlike Ahriman or Phosis T’kar, Hathor Maat’s skin was pale, like the smoothest marble, his golden hair like that painted on the heroic mosaics of the Athenaeum. Not a bead of sweat befouled Maat’s sculpted features.

  “I don’t care how they’ve done it,” said Phosis T’kar. “This place bores me. It’s been six months, and we should be making war in the Ark Reach Cluster. Lorgar’s 47th are expecting us, Russ too. And trust me, you don’t want to keep the Wolves waiting any longer than you must.”

  “The primarch says we stay, so we stay,” said Ahriman.

  Sobek, his dutiful Practicus, stepped forward and offered him a goblet of water. Ahriman drained the cool liquid in a single swallow. He shook his head when Sobek held a bronze hes out to refill it.

  “No, take it to remembrancer Eris,” he commanded. “She is at the deadstones and has more need of it than I.”

  Sobek nodded and left the shade of the canopy without another word. Ahriman’s battle-plate cooled him, recycling the moisture of his body and turning aside the worst of the searing heat. The remembrancers that had come to the planet’s surface were not so fortunately equipped, and dozens had already been returned to the Photep’s Medicae decks suffering from heatstroke and dehydration.

  “You indulge the woman, Ahzek,” said Hathor Maat. “It’s not that hot.”

  “Easy for you to say,” replied Phosis T’kar, wiping sweat from his skull with a cleaning rag. “We can’t all be Pavoni. Some of us have to deal with this heat on our own.”

  “With further study, meditation and mental discipline you might one day achieve a mastery equal to mine,” replied Maat, and though his tone was jovial, Ahriman knew he wasn’t joking. “You Raptora are belligerent sorts, but eventually you might be able to master the necessary Enumerations.”

  Phosis T’kar scowled, and a dense cluster of salt crystals flew from the ground beside him, aimed at Hathor Maat’s head. Before it reached its target, the warrior’s hand flashed, quick as lightning, and caught it.

  Maat crushed the mass of crystals, letting it spill from his hand like dust.

  “Surely you can muster something better than that?”

  “Enough,” said Ahriman. “Hold your powers in check, both of you. They are not for vulgar displays, especially when there are mortals nearby.”

  “Then why keep them around?” asked Maat. “Simply send her on her way with the others.”

  “That’s what I keep telling him,” said Phosis T’kar. “If she’s so damn keen to learn of the Crusade, send her to a Legion that cares about being immortalised, the Ultramarines or Word Bearers; she doesn’t belong with us.”

  It was a familiar sentiment, and Ahriman had heard it a hundred times from all his fellow captains. T’kar was not the most vocal; that honour belonged to Khalophis of the 6th Fellowship. Whichever viewpoint T’kar took, Khalophis would emulate more vociferously.

  “Should we not be remembered?” countered Ahriman. “The wr
itings of Kallista Eris are among the most insightful I have read from the Remembrancer Order. Why should we be left out of the annals of the Great Crusade?”

  “You know why,” said Phosis T’kar angrily. “Half the Imperium wished us dead not so long ago. They fear us.”

  “They fear what they do not understand,” said Ahriman. “The primarch tells us their fear comes from ignorance. Knowledge will be our illumination to banish that fear.”

  Phosis T’kar grunted and carved spirals in the salt with his thoughts.

  “The more they know, the more they’ll fear us. You mark my words,” he said.

  Ahriman ignored Phosis T’kar and stepped out from the shelter of the canopy. The sensations of travelling in his subtle body were all but gone, and the mundane nature of the material world returned to him: the searing heat that had turned his skin the colour of mahogany within an hour of the Stormbird touching down, the oily sweat coating his iron hard flesh and the crisp scent of the air, a mixture of burnt salt and rich spices.

  And the swirling aetheric winds that swept the surface of this world.

  Ahriman felt power coursing through his body; glittering comet trails of psychic potential aching to be moulded into something tangible. Over a century of training kept that power fluid, washing through his flesh like a gentle tide, preventing dangerous levels of aetheric energy from building. It would be too easy to give in and allow it free rein, but Ahriman knew only too well the danger that represented. He reached up and touched the silver oakleaf worked into his right shoulder-guard, and calmed his aetheric field with a deep breath and a whispered recitation of the Enumerations.