‘Garviel!’ a desperate voice called over the suit-vox. ‘Garviel, can you hear me?’
‘Loud and dear, Tarik!’ answered Loken.
‘We have to stop this!’ cried Torgaddon. ‘We’ve won, it’s over. Get a hold of your company.’
‘Understood,’ said Loken, pleased that Torgaddon had realised the same thing as he had.
Soon the inter-suit vox network was alive with barked orders to halt the attack that quickly passed down the chain of command.
By the time the echoes of battle were finally stilled, Loken could see that the Astartes had just barely managed to hold themselves from plunging into an abyss of barbarity, out of which they might never have climbed. Blood, bodies and the stink of battle filled the day, and as Loken looked up into the beautifully clear sky, he could see that the sun was almost at its zenith.
The final storm of the Iron Citadel had taken less than an hour, yet had cost the lives of a primarch, hundreds of the World Eaters, thousands of the Brotherhood, and the Emperor alone knew how many Sons of Horus.
The mass slaughter seemed such a terrible waste of life for what was a paltry prize: ruined cities, a battered and hostile populace, and a world that was sure to rebel as soon as it had the chance.
Was this world’s compliance worth such bloodshed?
The majority of the Brotherhood warriors had died in those last enraged minutes, but many more were prisoners of the Sons of Horus, rather than their victims.
Loken removed his helmet and gulped in a lungful of the clear air, its crispness tasting like the sweetest wine after the recycled air of his armour. He made his way through the wreckage of battle, the torn remnants of enemy warriors strewn like offal throughout the esplanade.
He found Torgaddon on his knees, also with his helmet off and breathing deeply. His friend looked up as Loken approached and smiled weakly. ‘Well… we did it.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Loken sadly, looking around at the crimson spoils of victory. ‘We did, didn’t we?’
Loken had killed thousands of enemies before, and he would kill thousands more in wars yet to be fought, but something in the savagery of this battle had soured his notion of triumph.
The two captains turned as they heard the tramp of booted feet behind them, seeing the lead battalions of the Byzant Janizars finally climbing into the citadel. Loken could see the horror on the soldiers’ faces and knew that the glory of the Astartes would be tarnished for every man who set foot inside.
‘Varvarus is here,’ said Loken.
‘Just in time, eh?’ said Torgaddon. ‘This’ll sweeten his mood towards us.’
Loken nodded and simply watched as the richly appointed command units of the Byzant Janizars entered the citadel, their tall blue banners snapping in the wind, and brilliantly decorated officers scanning the battlefield.
Hektor Varvarus stood at the crest of the breach and surveyed the scene of carnage, his horrified expression easy to read even from a distance. Loken felt his resentment towards Varvarus swell as he thought,
this is what we were created for, what else did you expect?
‘Looks like their leaders are here to surrender to Varvarus,’ said Torgaddon, pointing to a long column of beaten men and women marching from the smoking ruins of the inner keep, red and silver banners carried before them. A hundred warriors in battered plate armour marched with them, their long barrelled weapons shouldered and pointed at the ground.
Robed magos and helmeted officers led the column, their faces downcast and resigned to their capitulation. With the storm of the esplanade, the citadel was lost and the leaders of the Brotherhood knew it.
‘Come on,’ said Loken. ‘This is history. Since there are no remembrancers here, we might as well be part of this.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Torgaddon, pushing himself to his feet. The two captains drew parallel with the column of beaten Brotherhood warriors, and soon every one of the Sons of Horus who had survived the escalade surrounded them.
Loken watched Varvarus climb down the rearward slope of the breach and make his way towards the leaders of the Auretian Technocracy. He bowed formally and said, ‘My name is Lord Commander Hektor Varvarus, commander of the Emperor’s armies in the 63rd Expedition. To whom do I have the honour of addressing?’
An elderly warrior in gold plate armour stepped from the ranks of men, his black and silver heraldry carried on a personal banner pole by a young lad of no more than sixteen years.
‘I am Ephraim Guardia,’ he said, ‘Senior Preceptor of the Brotherhood Chapter Command and Castellan of the Iron Citadel.’
Loken could see the tension on Guardia’s face, and knew that it was taking the commander all his self-control to remain calm in the face of the massacre he had just witnessed.
‘Tell me,’ said Guardia. ‘Is this how all wars are waged in your Imperium?’
‘War is a harsh master, senior preceptor,’ answered Varvarus. ‘Blood is spilled and lives are lost. I feel the sorrow of your losses, but excess of grief for the dead is madness. It is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.’
‘Spoken like a tyrant and a killer,’ snarled Guardia, and Varvarus bristled with anger at his defeated foe’s lack of etiquette.
‘Given time, you will see that war is not what the Imperium stands for,’ promised Varvarus. ‘The Emperor’s Great Crusade is designed to bring reason and illumination to the lost strands of mankind. I promise you that this… unpleasantness will soon be forgotten as we go forward into a new age of peace.’
Guardia shook his head and reached into a pouch at his side. ‘I think you are wrong, but you have beaten us and my opinion means nothing any more.’
He unrolled a sheet of parchment and said, ‘I shall read our declaration to you, Varvarus. All my officers have signed it and it will stand as a testament to our attempts to defy you.’
Clearing his throat, Guardia began to read.
‘We fought your treacherous Warmaster to preserve our way of life and to resist the yoke of Imperial rule. It was, in truth, not for glory, nor riches, nor for honour that we fought, but for freedom, which no honest man could ever wish to give up. However, the greatest of our warriors cannot stand before the savagery of your war, and rather than see our culture exterminated, we surrender this citadel and our worlds to you. May you rule in peace more kindly than you make war.’
Before Varvarus could react to the senior preceptor’s declaration, the rubble behind him shifted and groaned, cracks splitting the rock and metal as something vast and terrible heaved upwards from beneath the ground.
At first Loken thought that it was the second seismic charge he had feared, but then he saw that these tremors were far more localised. Janizars scattered, and men shouted in alarm as more debris clattered from the breach. Loken gripped the hilt of his sword as he saw many of the Brotherhood warriors reach for their weapons.
Then the breach exploded with a grinding crack of ruptured stone, and something immense and red erupted from the ground with a bestial roar of hate and bloodlust. Soldiers fell away from the red giant, hurled aside by the violence of his sudden appearance.
Angron towered over them, bloody and enraged, and Loken marvelled that he could still be alive after thousands of tonnes of rock had engulfed him. But Angron was a primarch and what – save for an anathame – could lay one such as him low?
‘Blood for Horus!’ shouted Angron and leapt from the breach.
The primarch landed with a thunderous impact that split the stone beneath him, his chain-glaive sweeping out and cleaving the entire front rank of Brotherhood warriors to bloody rain. Ephraim Guardia died in the first seconds of Angron’s attack, his body cloven through the chest with a single blow.
Angron howled in battle lust as he hacked his way through the Brotherhood with great, disembowelling sweeps of his monstrous, roaring weapon. The madness of his slaughter was terrifying, but the warriors of the Brotherhood were not about to die without a fight.
Loken shouted, ‘No! Stop!’ but it was already too late. The remainder of the Brotherhood shouldered their weapons and began firing on the Sons of Horus and the rampaging primarch.
‘Open fire!’ shouted Loken, knowing he had no choice.
Gunfire tore through the ranks of the Brotherhood, the point-blank firefight a lethal firestorm of explosive bolter rounds. The noise was deafening and horrifyingly brief as the Brotherhood were mercilessly gunned down by the Astartes or hacked apart by Angron.
Within seconds, it was over and the last remnants of the Brotherhood were no more.
Desperate cries for medics sounded from the command units of the Janizars, and Loken saw a group of bloody soldiers on their knees around a fallen officer, his cream greatcoat drenched in blood. The gold of his medals gleamed in the cold midday light and as one of the kneeling soldiers shifted position, Loken realised the identity of the fallen man.
Hektor Varvarus lay in a spreading pool of blood, and even from a distance, Loken could see that there would be no saving him. The man’s body had been ripped open from the inside, the gleaming ends of splintered ribs jutting from his chest where it was clear a bolter round had detonated within him.
Loken wept to see this fragile peace broken, and dropped his sword in disgust at what had happened and at what he had been forced to do. With Angron’s senseless attack, the lives of his warriors had been threatened, and he’d had no other choice but to order the attack.
Still, he regretted it.
The Brotherhood had been honourable foes and the Sons of Horus had butchered them like cattle. Angron stood in the midst of the carnage, his glaive spraying the warriors nearest him with spatters of blood from the roaring chainblade.
The Sons of Horus cheered in praise of the World Eaters’ primarch, but Loken felt soul sick at such a barbaric sight.
‘That was no way for warriors to die,’ said Torgaddon. ‘Their deaths shame us all.’
Loken didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
TWENTY-ONE
Illumination
W
ITH
THE
FALL
of the Iron Citadel, the war on Aureus was over. The Brotherhood was destroyed as a fighting force and though there were still pockets of resistance to be mopped up, the fighting was as good as over. Casualties on both sides had been high, most especially in the Army units of the Expedition. Hektor Varvarus was brought back to the fleet with due reverence and his body returned to space in a ceremony attended by the highest-ranking officers of the Expeditions.
The Warmaster himself spoke the lord commander’s eulogy, the passion and depths of his sorrow plain to see.
‘Heroism is not only in the man, but in the occasion,’ the Warmaster had said of Lord Commander Varvarus. ‘It is only when we look now and see his success that men will say that it was good fortune. It was not. We lost thousands of our best warriors that day and I feel the loss of every one. Hektor Varvarus was a leader who knew that to march with the gods, one must wait until he hears their footsteps sounding through events, and then leap up and grasp the hem of their robes.
‘Varvarus is gone from us, but he would not want us to pause in mourning, for history is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast to it is to be swept aside and that, my friends, will never happen. Not while I am Warmaster. Those men who fought and bled with Varvarus shall have this world to stand sentinel over, so that his sacrifice will never be forgotten.’
Other speakers had said their farewells to the lord commander, but none with the Warmaster’s eloquence. True to his word, Horus ensured that Army units that had been loyal to Varvarus were appointed to minister the worlds he had died to make compliant.
A new Imperial commander was installed, and the martial power of the fleet began the time-consuming process of regrouping in preparation for the next stage of the Crusade.
K
ARKASY
’
S
BILLET
STANK
of ink and printing fumes, the crude, mechanical bulk printer working overtime to print enough copies of the latest edition of
The Truth is All We Have
. Though his output had been less prolific of late, the Bondsman number 7 box was nearly empty. Ignace Karkasy remembered wondering, a lifetime ago it seemed, whether or not the lifespan of his creativity could be measured in the quantity of paper he had left to fill. Such thoughts seemed meaningless, given the powerful desire to write that was upon him these days.
He sat on the edge of his cot bed, the last remaining place for him to sit, penning the latest scurrilous piece of verse for his pamphlet and humming contentedly to himself. Papers filled the billet, strewn across the floor, tacked upon the walls or piled on any surface flat enough to hold them. Scribbled notes, abandoned odes and half-finished poems filled the space, but such was the fecundity of his muse that he didn’t expect to exhaust it any time soon.
He’d heard that the war with the Auretians was over, the final citadel having fallen to the Sons of Horus a couple of days ago in what the ship scuttlebutt was already calling the White Mountains Massacre. He didn’t yet know the full story, but several sources he’d cultivated over the ten months of the war would surely garner him some juicy titbits.
He heard a curt knock on his door-shutter and shouted, ‘Come in!’
Karkasy kept on writing as the shutter opened, too focused on his words to waste a single second of his time.
‘Yes?’ he said, ‘What can I do for you?’
No answer was forthcoming, so Karkasy looked up in irritation to see an armoured warrior standing mutely before him. At first, Karkasy felt a thrill of panic, seeing the man’s longsword and the hard, metallic gleam of a bolstered pistol, but he relaxed as he saw that the man was Petronella Vivar’s bodyguard – Maggard, or something like that.
‘Well?’ he asked again. ‘Was there something you wanted?’
Maggard said nothing and Karkasy remembered that the man was mute, thinking it foolish that anyone would send someone who couldn’t speak as a messenger.