False Gods (22 page)

Titus Cassar was exhausted. He’d spent the better part of the day prepping the Titan for its recovery and everything was in readiness for their return to the fleet. Until they were recovered, there wasn’t much to do except wait, and that had become the hardest part of all for the men left behind on Davin’s moon.

With time to wait, there was time to think; and with time to think, the human mind could conjure all manner of things from the depths of its imagination. Titus still couldn’t believe that Horus had fallen. A being of such power, like unto a Titan himself, was not meant to fall in battle – he was invincible, the son of a god.

In the shadow of the
Dies Irae
, Titus fished out his
Lectitio Divinitatus
chapbook and, once he was satisfied he was alone, began to read the words there. The badly printed scripture gave him comfort, turning his mind to the glory of the divine Emperor of Mankind.

‘Oh Emperor, who is lord and god above us all, hear me in this hour of need. Your servant lies with death’s cold touch upon him and I ask you to turn your beneficent gaze his way.’

He fished out a pendant from beneath his uniform jacket as he read. It was a delicately wrought thing of silver and gold that he’d had one of the blank-faced servitors fashion for him. A silver capital T with a golden starburst at its centre, it represented hope and the promise of a better future.

He held it clasped to his breast as he recited more of the words of the
Lectitio Divinitatus
, feeling a familiar warmth suffuse him as he repeated the words.

Titus sensed the presence of other people behind him a second too late and turned to see Jonah Aruken and a group of the Titan’s crew.

Like him, they were dirty and tired after the fight against the monsters of this place, but unlike him they did not have faith.

Guiltily, he closed his chapbook and waited for Jonah’s inevitable barb. No one said anything, and as he looked closer, he saw a brittle edge of sorrow and the need for comfort in the faces of the men before him.

‘Titus,’ said Jonah Aruken. ‘We… uh… that is… the Warmaster. We wondered if…’

Titus smiled in welcome as understood what they’d come for.

He opened his chapbook again and said; ‘Let us pray, brothers.’

T
HE
MEDICAL
DECK
was a sterile, gleaming wilderness of tiled walls and brushed steel cabinets, a warren of soulless glass rooms and laboratories. Petronella had completely lost all sense of direction, bewildered by the hasty summons that had brought her from the moon’s surface back to the
Vengeful Spirit
.

Passing through the bloody embarkation deck, she saw that the upper levels of the ship were in pandemonium as word of the Warmaster’s death had spread from vessel to vessel with all the fearsome rapidity of an epidemic.

Maloghurst the Twisted had issued a fleet-wide communiqué denying that the Warmaster was dead, but hysteria and paranoia had a firm head start on his words. Riots had taken hold aboard several ships as doomsayers and demagogues had arisen proclaiming that these were now the end times. Army units had been ruthlessly quashing such malcontents, but more sprang up faster then they could stop them.

It had been scant hours since the Warmaster’s fall, but the 63rd Expedition was already beginning to tear itself apart without him.

Maggard followed Petronella, his wounds bound and sealed with syn-skin by a Legion apothecary on the journey back to the Warmaster’s flagship. His skin still had an unhealthy pallor and his armour was dented and torn, but he was alive and magnificent. Maggard was only an indentured servant, but he had impressed her and she resolved to treat him with the respect his talents deserved.

A helmeted Astartes warrior led her through the confusing maze of the medicae deck, eventually indicating that she should enter a nondescript white door marked with a winged staff wrapped in a pair of twisting serpents.

Maggard opened the door for her and she entered a gleaming operating theatre, its circular walls covered, to waist height, in green enameled tiles. Silver cabinets and hissing, pumping machines surrounded the Warmaster, who lay on the operating slab with a tangled web of tubes and wires attached to his flesh. A stool of gleaming metal sat next to the slab.

Medicae servitors lurked around the circumference of the room, set into niches around the wall, and a gurgling machine suspended above the Warmaster fed fluid and blood into his body.

Her eyes misted to see the Warmaster brought so low, and tears came at this violation of the natural order of things. A giant Astartes warrior in hooded surgical robes approached her and said, ‘My name is Apothecary Vaddon, Miss Vivar.’

She brushed her hands across her eyes, conscious of how she must look – her dress torn and caked with mud, her eyes blackened with smudged make-up. She started to hold her hand out for a kiss, but realized how foolish that would be and simply nodded.

‘I am Petronella Vivar,’ she managed. ‘I am the Warmaster’s documentarist.’

‘I know,’ said Vaddon. ‘He asked for you by name.’

Sudden hope flared in her breast. ‘He’s awake?’

Vaddon nodded. ‘He is. If it was up to me, you would not be here now, but I do not disobey the word of the commander, and he desires to speak with you.’

‘How is he?’ she asked.

The apothecary shook his head. ‘He fades in and out of lucidity, so do not expect too much of him. If I decide it is time for you to leave, then you leave. Do you understand me?’

‘I do,’ she said, ‘but please, may I speak with him now?’

Vaddon seemed reluctant to let her near the Warmaster, but moved aside and let her pass. She nodded her thanks and took a faltering step towards the operating slab, eager to see the Warmaster, but afraid of what she might find.

Petronella’s hand leapt to her mouth to stifle an involuntary gasp at the sight of him. The Warmaster’s cheeks were sunken and hollow, his eyes dull and listless. Grey flesh hung from his skull, wrinkled and ancient looking, and his lips were the blue of a corpse.

‘Do I look that bad?’ asked Horus, his voice rasping and distant.

‘No,’ she stammered. ‘Not at all, I…’

‘Don’t lie to me, Miss Vivar. If you’re to hear my valediction then there must be no deceit between us.’

‘Valediction? No! I won’t. You have to live,’

‘Believe me, there’s nothing I’d like more,’ he wheezed, ‘but Vaddon tells me there’s not much chance of that, and I don’t intend to leave this life without a proper legacy: a record that says the things that must be said before the end.’

‘Sir, your deeds alone stand as an eternal legacy, please don’t ask this of me.’

Horus coughed a froth of blood onto his chest, gathering his strength before speaking once more, and his voice was the strong and powerful one she remembered. ‘You told me that it was your vocation to immortalize me, to record the glory of Horus for future generations, did you not?’

‘I did,’ she sobbed.

‘Then do this last thing for me, Miss Vivar,’ he said.

She swallowed hard and then fished out the data-slate and memo-quill from her reticule, before sitting on the high stool next to the operating slab.

‘Very well,’ she said at last. ‘Let’s start at the beginning.’

‘I
T
WAS
TOO
much,’ began Horus. ‘I promised my father I would make no mistakes, and now we have come to this.’

‘Mistakes?’ asked Petronella, though she suspected she knew the Warmaster’s meaning.

‘Temba, giving him lordship over Davin,’ said Horus. ‘He begged me not to leave him behind, claimed it was too much for him. I should have listened, but I was too eager to be away on some fresh conquest.’

‘Temba’s weakness is not your fault, sir,’ she said.

‘It is good of you to say that, Miss Vivar, but I appointed him,’ said Horus. ‘The responsibility lies with me. Throne! Guilliman will laugh when he hears of this: him and the Lion both. They will say that I was not fit to be Warmaster since I could not read the hearts of men.’

‘Never!’ cried Petronella. ‘They wouldn’t dare.’

‘Oh, they will, girl, believe me. We are brothers, yes, but like all brothers we squabble and seek to outdo one another.’

Petronella could think of nothing to say; the idea of the superhuman primarchs squabbling quite beyond her.

‘They were jealous, all of them,’ continued Horus. ‘When the Emperor named me Warmaster, it was all some of them could do to congratulate me. Angron especially, he was a wild one, and even now I can barely keep him in check. Guilliman wasn’t much better. I could tell he thought it should have been him.’

‘They were jealous of you?’ asked Petronella, unable to believe what the Warmaster was telling her, the memo-quill scratching across the data-slate in response to her thoughts.

‘Oh yes,’ nodded Horus bitterly. ‘Only a few of my brothers were gracious enough to bow their heads and mean it. Lorgar, Mortarion, Sanguinius, Fulgrim and Dorn – they are true brothers. I remember watching the Emperor’s Stormbird leaving Ullanor and weeping to see him go, but most of all I remember the knives I felt in my back as he went. I could hear their thoughts as clearly as though they spoke them aloud: why should I, Horus, be named Warmaster when there were others more worthy of the honour?’

‘You were made Warmaster
because
you were the most worthy, sir,’ said Petronella.

‘No,’ said Horus. ‘I was not. I was simply the one who most embodied the Emperor’s need at that time. You see, for the first three decades of the Great Crusade I fought alongside the Emperor, and I alone felt the full weight of his ambition to rule the galaxy. He passed that vision to me and I carried it with me in my heart as we forged our path across the stars. It was a grand adventure we were on, system after system reunited with the Master of Mankind. You cannot imagine what it was like to live in such times, Miss Vivar.’

‘It sounds magnificent.’

‘It was,’ said Horus. ‘It was, but it couldn’t last. Soon we were being drawn to other worlds where we discovered my brother primarchs. We had been scattered throughout the galaxy not long after our birth and, one by one, the Emperor recovered us all.’

‘It must have been strange to be reunited with brothers you had never known.’

‘Not as strange as you might think. As soon as I met each one, I had an immediate kinship with him, a bond that not even time or distance had broken. I won’t deny that some were harder to like than others. If you ever meet Night Haunter you’ll understand what I mean. Moody bastard, but handy in a tight spot when you need some alien empire shitting in its breeches before you attack.

‘Angron’s not much better, mind; he’s got a temper on him like you’ve never seen. You think you know anger, I tell you now that you don’t know anything until you’ve seen Angron lose his temper. And don’t get me started on the Lion.’

‘Of the Dark Angels? His is the First Legion is it not?’

‘It is,’ replied Horus, ‘and doesn’t he just love to remind everyone of that. I could see in his eyes that he thought he should have been Warmaster because his Legion was the first. Did you know he’d grown up living like an animal in the wilds, little better than a feral savage? I ask you, is that the sort of man you want as your Warmaster?’

‘No it’s not,’ said Horus, answering his own question. ‘Then who would you have picked to be Warmaster if not you?’ asked Petronella.

Horus appeared to be momentarily perturbed by her question, but said, ‘Sanguinius. It should have been him. He has the vision and strength to carry us to victory, and the wisdom to rule once that victory is won. For all his aloof coolness, he alone has the Emperor’s soul in his blood. Each of us carries part of our father within us, whether it is his hunger for battle, his psychic talent or his determination to succeed. Sanguinius holds it all. It should have been his…’ ‘And what part of the Emperor do you carry, sir?’ ‘Me? I carry his ambition to rule. While the conquest of the galaxy lay before us that was enough, but now we are nearing the end. There is a Kretan proverb that says that peace is always “over there”, but that is no longer true: it is within our grasp. The job is almost done and what is left for a man of ambition when the work is over?’

‘You are the Emperor’s right hand, sir,’ protested Petronella. ‘His favored son.’

‘No more,’ said Horus sadly. ‘Petty functionaries and administrators have supplanted me. The War Council is no more and I receive my orders from the Council of Terra now. Once everything in the Imperium was geared for war and conquest, but now we are burdened with eaxectors, scribes and scriveners who demand to know the cost of everything. The Imperium is changing and I’m not sure I know how to change with it.’

‘In what way is the Imperium changing?’

‘Bureaucracy and officialdom are taking over, Miss Vivar. Red tape, administrators and clerks are replacing the heroes of the age and unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as an empire will soon be a footnote in the history books. Everything I have achieved will be a distant memory of former glory, lost in the mists of time like the civilizations of ancient Terra, remembered kindly for their noble past.’

‘But surely the Crusade was but the first step towards creating a new Imperium for mankind to rule the galaxy. In such a galaxy we will need administrators, laws and scribes.’

‘And what of the warriors who conquered it for you?’ snarled Horus. ‘What becomes of us? Are we to become gaolers and peacekeepers? We were bred for war and we were bred to kill. That is what we were created for, but we have become so much more than that. I am more than that.’

‘Progress is hard, my lord, and people must always adapt to changing times,’ said Petronella, uneasy at this change of temper in the Warmaster.

‘It is not strange to mistake change for progress, Miss Vivar,’ said Horus. ‘I was bred with wondrous powers encoded into my very flesh, but I did not dream myself into the man I am today; I hammered and forged myself upon the anvil of battle and conquest. All that I have achieved in the last two centuries will be given away to weak men and women who were not here to shed their blood with us in the dark places of the galaxy. Where is the justice in that? Lesser men will rule what I have conquered, but what will be my reward once the fighting is done?’