Horus Rising (39 page)

They sat on the couch facing him. Horus took up a fresh cup, and poured wine from a silver ewer. ‘The wise one and the quiet one,’ he said. Loken wasn’t sure which the Warmaster thought he was. ‘Counsel me, then. You were both entirely too silent during that debate.’

Aximand cleared his throat. ‘Ezekyle had… a point,’ he began. He stiffened as he saw the Warmaster raise his eyebrows.

‘Go on, little one.’

‘You have… that is to say… we prosecute this crusade according to certain doctrines. For two centuries, we have done so. Laws of life, laws on which the Imperium is founded. They are not arbitrary. They were given to us, to uphold, by the Emperor himself.’

‘Beloved of all,’ Horus said.

‘The Emperor’s doctrines have guided us since the start. We have never disobeyed them.’ Aximand paused, then added, ‘Before.’

‘You think this is disobedience, little one?’ Horus asked. Aximand shrugged. ‘What about you, Garviel?’ Horus asked. ‘Are you with Aximand on this?’

Loken looked back into the Warmaster’s eyes. ‘I know why we ought to make war upon the interex, sir,’ he said. ‘What interests me is why you think we shouldn’t.’

Horus smiled. ‘At last, a thinking man.’ He rose to his feet and, carrying his cup carefully, walked across to the right-hand wall of the stateroom, a section of which had been richly decorated with a mural. The painting showed the Emperor, ascendant above all, catching the spinning constellations in his outstretched hand. ‘The stars,’ Horus said. ‘See, there? How he scoops them up? The zodiacs swirl into his grasp like fireflies. The stars are mankind’s birthright. That’s what he told me. That’s one of the first things he told me when we met. I was like a child then, raised up from nothing. He set me at his side, and pointed to the heavens. Those points of light, he said, are what we have been waiting generations to master. Imagine, Horus, every one a human culture, every one a realm of beauty and magnificence, free from strife, free from war, free from bloodshed and the tyrannous oppression of alien overlords. Make no mistake, he said, and they will be ours.’

Horus slowly traced his fingers across the whorl of painted stars until his hand met the image of the Emperor’s hand. He took his touch away and looked back at Aximand and Loken. ‘As a foundling, on Cthonia, I saw the stars very infrequently. The sky was so often thick with foundry smoke and ash, but you remember, of course.’ ‘Yes,’ said Loken. Little Horus nodded. ‘On those few nights when the stars were visible, I wondered at them. Wondered what they were and what they meant. Little, mysterious sparks of light, they had to have some purpose in being there. I wondered such things every day of my life until the Emperor came. I was not surprised when he told me how important they were.’

‘I’ll tell you a thing,’ said Horus, walking back to them and resuming his seat. ‘The first thing my father gave me was an astrological text. It was a simple thing, a child’s primer. I have it here somewhere. He noted my wonder in the stars, and wished me to learn and understand.’

He paused. Loken was always captivated whenever Horus began to refer to the Emperor as ‘my father’. It had happened a few times since Loken had been part of the inner circle, and on every occasion it had led to unguarded revelations.

‘There were zodiac charts in it. In the text,’ Horus took a sip of his wine and smiled at the memory. ‘I learned them all. In one evening. Not just the names, but the patterns, the associations, the structure. All twenty signs. The next day, my father laughed at my appetite for knowledge. He told me the zodiac signs were old and unreliable models, now that the explorator fleets had begun detailed cosmological mapping. He told me that the twenty signs in the heavens would one day be matched by twenty sons like me. Each son would embody the character and notion of a particular zodiac group. He asked me which one I liked the best.’

‘What did you answer?’ Loken asked. Horus sat back, and chuckled. ‘I told him I liked all the patterns they made. I told him I was glad to finally have names for the sparks of light in the sky. I told him I liked Leos, naturally for his regal fury and Skorpos, for his armour and warlike blade. I told him that Tauromach appealed to my sense of stubbornness, and Arbitos to my sense of fairness and balance.’ The Warmaster shook his head, sadly. ‘My father said he admired my choices, but was surprised I had not picked another in particular. He showed me again the horseman with the bow, the galloping warrior. The dreadful Sagittary he said. Most warlike of all. Strong, relentless, unbridled, swift and sure of his mark. In ancient times, he told me, this was the greatest sign of all. The centaur, the horse-man, the hunter-warrior, had been beloved in the old ages. In Anatoly in his own childhood, the centaur had been a revered symbol. A rider upon a horse, so he said, armed with a bow. The most potent martial instrument of its age, conquering all before it. Over time, myth had blended horseman and steed into one form. The perfect synthesis of man and war machine. That is what you must learn to be, he told me. That is what you must master. One day, you must command my armies, my instruments of war, as if they were an extension of your own person. Man and horse, as one, galloping the heavens, submitting to no foe. At Ullanor, he gave me this.’

Horus set down his cup, and leaned forward to show them the weathered gold ring he wore on the smallest finger of his left hand. It was so eroded by age that the image was indistinct. Loken thought he could detect hooves, a man’s arm, a bent bow.

‘It was made in Persia, the year before the Emperor was born. The dreadful Sagittary. This is you now, he said to me. My Warmaster, my centaur. Half man, half army embedded in the Legions of the Imperium. Where you turn, so the Legions turn. Where you move, so they move. Where you strike, so they strike. Ride on without me, my son, and the armies will ride with you.’ There was a long silence. ‘So you see,’ Horus smiled. ‘I am predisposed to like the dreadful Sagittary, now we meet him, face to face.’

His smile was infectious. Both Loken and Aximand nodded and laughed. ‘Now tell them the real reason,’ a voice said. They turned. Sanguinius stood in an archway at the far end of the chamber, behind a veil of white silk. He had been listening. The Lord of Angels brushed the silk hanging aside, and stepped into the stateroom, the crests of his wings brushing the glossy material. He was dressed in a simple white robe, clasped at the waist with a girdle of gold links. He was eating fruit from a bowl. Loken and Aximand stood up quickly. ‘Sit down,’ Sanguinius said. ‘My brother’s in the mood to open his heart, so you had better hear the truth.’

‘I don’t believe—’ Horus began. Sanguinius scooped one of the small, red fruits from his bowl and threw it at Horus.

‘Tell them the rest,’ he sniggered.

Horus caught the thrown fruit, gazed at it, then bit into it. He wiped the juice off his chin with the back of his hand and looked across at Loken and Aximand.

‘Remember the start of my story?’ he asked. ‘What the Emperor said to me about the stars?
Make no mistake, and they will be ours.
’

He took another two bites, threw the fruit stone away, and swallowed the flesh before he continued. ‘Sanguinius, my dear brother, is right, for Sanguinius has always been my conscience.’

Sanguinius shrugged, an odd gesture for a giant with furled wings.

‘
Make no mistake,
’ Horus continued. ‘Those three words. Make no mistake. I am Warmaster, by the Emperor’s decree. I cannot fail him. I cannot make mistakes.’

‘Sir?’ Aximand ventured.

‘Since Ullanor, little one, I have made two. Or been party to two, and that is enough, for the responsibility for all expedition mistakes falls to me in the final count.’

‘What mistakes?’ asked Loken.

‘Mistakes. Misunderstandings.’ Horus stroked his hand across his brow. ‘Sixty-Three Nineteen. Our first endeavour. My first as Warmaster. How much blood was spilt there, blood from misunderstanding? We misread the signs and paid the price. Poor, dear Sejanus. I miss him still. That whole war, even that nightmare up on the mountains you had to endure, Garviel… a mistake. I could have handled it differently. Sixty-Three Nineteen could have been brought to compliance without bloodshed.’

‘No, sir,’ said Loken emphatically. ‘They were too set in their ways, and their ways were set against us. We could not have made them compliant without a war.’

Horus shook his head. ‘You are kind, Garviel, but you are mistaken. There were ways. There should have been ways. I should have been able to sway that civilisation without a shot being fired. The Emperor would have done so.’

‘I don’t believe he would,’ Aximand said.

‘Then there’s Murder,’ Horus continued, ignoring Little Horus’s remark. ‘Or Spiderland, as the interex has it. What is the way of their name for it again?’

‘Urisarach,’ Sanguinius said, helpfully. ‘Though I think the word only works with the appropriate harmonic accompaniment.’

‘Spiderland will suffice, then,’ said Horus. ‘What did we waste there? What misunderstandings did we make? The interex left us warnings to stay away, and we ignored them. An embargoed world, an asylum for the creatures they had bested in war, and we walked straight in.’

‘We weren’t to know,’ Sanguinius said.

‘We should have known!’ Horus snapped.

‘Therein lies the difference between our philosophy and that of the interex,’ Aximand said. ‘We cannot endure the existence of a malign alien race. They subjugate it, but refrain from annihilating it. Instead, they deprive it of space travel and exile it to a prison world.’

‘We annihilate,’ said Horus. ‘They find a means around such drastic measures. Which of us is the most humane?’

Aximand rose to his feet. ‘I find myself with Ezekyle on this. Tolerance is weakness. The interex is admirable, but it is forgiving and generous in its dealings with xenos breeds who deserve no quarter.’

‘It has brought them to book, and learned to live in sympathy,’ said Horus. ‘It has trained the kinebrach to—’

‘And that’s the best example I can offer!’ Aximand replied. ‘The kinebrach. It embraces them as part of its culture.’

‘I will not make another rash or premature decision,’ Horus stated flatly. ‘I have made too many, and my Warmastery is threatened by my mistakes. I will understand the interex, and learn from it, and parlay with it, and only then will I decide if it has strayed too far. They are a fine people. Perhaps we can learn from them for a change.’

T
HE MUSIC WAS
hard to get used to. Sometimes it was majesterial and loud, especially when the meturge players struck up, and sometimes it was just a quiet whisper, like a buzz, like tinnitus, but it seldom went away. The people of the interex called it the aria, and it was a fundamental part of their communication. They still used language – indeed, their spoken language was an evolved human dialect closer in form to the prime language of Terra than Cthonic – but they had long ago formulated the aria as an accompaniment and enhancement of speech, and as a mode of translation.

Scrutinised by the iterators during the voyage, the aria proved to be hard to define. Essentially, it was a form of high mathematics, a universal constant that transcended linguistic barriers, but the mathematical structures were expressed through specific harmonic and melodic modes which, to the untrained ear, sounded like music. Strands of complex melody rang in the background of all the interex’s vocal transmissions, and when one of their kind spoke face to face, it was usual to have one or more of the meturge players accompany his speech with their instruments. The meturge players were the translators and envoys.

Tall, like all the people of the interex, they wore long coats of a glossy, green fibre, laced with slender gold piping. The flesh of their ears was distended and splayed, by genetic and surgical enhancement, like the ears of bats or other nocturnal fliers. Comm technology, the equivalent of vox, was laced around the high collars of their coats, and each one carried an instrument strapped across his chest, a device with amplifiers and coiled pipes, and numerous digital keys on which the meturge player’s nimble fingers constantly rested. A swan-necked mouthpiece rose from the top of each instrument, enabling the player to blow, hum, or vocalise into the device.

The first meeting between Imperium and interex had been formal and cautious. Envoys came aboard the
Vengeful Spirit
, escorted by meturge players and soldiers.

The envoys were uniformly handsome and lean, with piercing eyes. Their hair was dressed short, and intricate dermatoglyphics – Loken suspected permanent tattoos – decorated either the left or right-hand sides of their faces. They wore knee-length robes of a soft, pale blue cloth, under which they were dressed in close-fitting clothing woven from the same, glossy fibre that composed the meturge players’ coats.

The soldiers were impressive. Fifty of them, led by officers, had descended from their shuttle. Taller than the envoys, they were clad from crown to toe in metal armour of burnished silver and emerald green with aposematic chevrons of scarlet. The armour was of almost delicate design, and sheathed their bodies tightly; it was in no way as massive or heavy-set as the Astartes’ plate. The soldiers – variously gleves or sagittars, Loken learned – were almost as tall as the Astartes, but with their far more slender build and more closely fitted armour, they seemed slight compared to the Imperial giants. Abaddon, at the first meeting, muttered that he doubted their fancy armour would stand even a slap.

Their weapons caused more remarks. Most of the soldiers had swords sheathed across their backs. Some, the gleves, carried long-bladed metal spears with heavy ball counterweights on the base ends. The others, the sagittars, carried recurve bows wrought from some dark metal. The sagittars had sheaves of long, flightless darts laced to their right thighs.

‘Bows?’ Torgaddon whispered. ‘Really? They stun us with the power and scale of their vessels, then come aboard carrying bows?’

‘They’re probably ceremonial,’ Aximand murmured.

The soldier officers wore serrated half-discs across the skulls of their helmets. The visors of their close-fitting helms were all alike: the metal modelled to the lines of brow and cheekbone and nose, with simple oval eye slits that were backlit blue. The mouth and chin area of each visor was built out, like a thrusting, pugnacious jaw, containing a communication module.