Текст книги "A Thousand Sons"

Автор книги: Грэм Макнилл

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THE HORUS HERESY

Graham McNeill

A THOUSAND SONS

All is dust…

original scan by Undead

edited by fractalnoise

v1.3 (2012.01)

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.

CONTENTS

A THOUSAND SONS

The Horus Heresy

CONTENTS

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

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 Legionhe 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 monumental, 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 Mundiof 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 thathot.”

“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 writings 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.

Ahriman looked up at the towering mountain, wondering at the vast power of its makers and what the primarch was doing inside it. Until the power to far-see was taken away, he had not realised how blind he was.

“Where ishe?” hissed Phosis T’kar, echoing his thoughts.

It had been four hours since Magnus the Red had followed Yatiri and his tribe into the Mountain, and the tension had been gnawing at their nerves ever since.

“You’re worried about him, aren’t you?” asked Hathor Maat.

“Since when could you master the powers of the Athanaean?” asked Ahriman.

“I don’t need to. I can see you’re both worried,” countered Maat. “It’s obvious.”

“Aren’t you?” asked Phosis T’kar.

“Magnus can look out for himself,” said Hathor Maat. “He told us to wait for him.”

The Primarch of the Thousand Sons had indeed told them to await his return, but Ahriman had a sick feeling that something was terribly wrong.

“Did you see something?” asked Phosis T’kar, noting Ahriman’s expression. “When you travelled the Great Ocean, you saw something, didn’t you? Tell me.”

“I saw nothing,” said Ahriman bitterly. He turned and marched back into his pavilion, retrieving his weapons from a long footlocker of acacia and jade. He bolstered a pistol that was as fine an example of the armourer’s art as any crafted by the artificers of Vulkan’s Salamanders, its flanks plated with golden backswept hawk wings and its grip textured with stippled hide.

As well as his pistol, he also bore a long heqa staff of ivory with a hooked blade at its end, its length gold-plated and reinforced with blue copper bands.

“What are you doing?” asked Hathor Maat when he emerged, accoutred for war.

“I’m taking the Sekhmet into that mountain,” said Ahriman. “Are you coming?”

LEMUEL GAUMON RECLINED against one of the deadstones in the foothills of the enormous mountain, trying to keep within its shadow and wishing his frame was rather less fulsome. Growing up in the mid-continental drift-hives of the Nordafrik enclaves, he was used to heat, but this world was something else entirely.

He wore a long banyan of lightweight linen, colourfully embroidered with interlocking motifs of lightning bolts, bulls, spirals and numerous other less easily identifiable symbols. It had been woven by a blind tailor in the Sangha commercia-subsid to his design, the imagery taken from the scrolls collected in the secret library of his villa in Mobayi. Dark-skinned and shaven-headed, his deep-set eyes carefully watched the encampment of the Thousand Sons, while he occasionally made notes in a pad balanced on his thigh.

Perhaps a hundred scarlet pavilions dotted the salt plains, their sides tied up, each home to a band of Thousand Sons warriors. He’d noted which Fellowships were represented: Ahriman’s Scarab Occult, Ankhu Anen’s 4th, Khalophis’ 6th, Hathor Maat’s 3rd and Phosis T’kar’s 2nd.

A sizeable war-host of Astartes warriors was encamped before the mountain, the atmosphere strangely tense, though Lemuel could see no cause for it. It was clear they weren’t expecting trouble, but it was equally clear something was troubling them.

Lemuel closed his eyes and let his consciousness drift on the invisible currents of power that rippled in the air like a heat haze. Though his eyes were shut, he could feel the energy of this world like a vivid canvas of colour, brighter than the greatest works of Serena d’Angelus or Kelan Roget. Beyond the deadstones, the mountain was a black wall of nothingness, a cliff of utter darkness as solid and as impenetrable as adamantium.

But further out into the salt flats, the world was alive with colour.

The Thousand Sons encampment was a blazing inferno of shifting colours and light, like an atomic explosion frozen at the instant of detonation. Even amid that blazing illumination, some lights shone brighter than others, and three such minds were gathered beneath where Lemuel knew Captain Ahriman’s pavilion was pitched. Something preyed upon these minds, and he dearly wished he was strong enough to venture closer. A bright mind, a supernova amongst guttering candles, normally burned at the heart of the encampment, but not today.

Perhaps that was the source of the Thousand Sons’ tension.

Their great leader was in absentia.

Frustrated, Lemuel’s mind drifted away from the Thousand Sons, and he let it approach the sunken dwellings of the Aghoru. Cut into the dry earth, they were as dark and lifeless as the Thousand Sons were bright and vital. The Aghoru people were as barren as the salt plain, without the slightest spark of a presence within them.

He opened his eyes, exhaling and reciting the Mantra of the Sangoma to calm his racing heartbeat. Lemuel took a drink from his canvas-wrapped canteen, the water warm and gritty but deliciously welcome. Three more canteens lay in the pack next to him, but they would only last the rest of the afternoon. By nightfall, he would need to refill them, for the remorseless heat let up only marginally during the hours of darkness.

“How can anyone live in this heat?” he wondered aloud for the hundredth time.

“They don’t,” said a woman’s voice behind him, and he smiled at the sound. “They mostly live in the fertile river deltas further north or on the western coast.”

“So you said, my dear Camille,” he said, “but to willingly trek from there to this desolate place seems to defy all logic.”

The speaker moved into view, and he squinted through the sun’s glare at a young woman dressed in a tight-fitting vest, lightweight cut-off fatigues and dusty sandals. She carried a combination vox-recorder and picter in a sling around her neck, and a canvas shoulder bag stuffed with notebooks and sketchpads.

Camille Shivani cut an impressive figure with her sun-browned skin, long dark hair bound up beneath a loose turban of wrapped silk and dark glare-shields. Her skin was ruddy brown, her manner forthright, and Lemuel liked her immensely. She smiled down at him, and he gave her his best, most winning smile in return. It was a wasted effort; Camille’s appetites did not include the likes of him, but it never hurt to be courteous.

“Lemuel, when it comes to humanity, even lost strands of it, you should know that logic has precious little to do with how people behave,” said Camille Shivani, brushing her hands together to clear dust from the thin gloves she always wore.

“So very true. Why else would we linger here when there’s nothing worth remembering?”

“Nothing worth remembering? Nonsense, there’s lots to learn here,” she said.

“For an archaeohistorian, maybe,” he said.

“I spent a week living with the Aghoru, exploring the ruins their villages are built upon. It’s fascinating; you should come with me next time I make a trip.”

“Me? What would I learn there?” he asked. “I study how societies form aftercompliance, not the ruins of dead ones.”

“Yes, but what was there before has an impact on what’ll follow. You know as well as I do that you can’t just stamp one civilisation on top of another without taking into account the previous culture’s history.”

“True, but the Aghoru don’t seem to have much history to supplant,” he said sadly. “I don’t think what they have will long survive the coming of the Imperium.”

“You might be right, but that just makes studying them while we can even more important.”

Lemuel clambered to his feet, the effort causing him to break out in torrents of sweat.

“Not a good climate for a fat man,” he said.

“You’re not fat,” said Camille. “You’re generously portioned.”

“And you are very kind, but I know what I am,” said Lemuel, brushing his banyan free of salt crystals. He looked around the circle of towering stones. “Where are your companions?”

“Ankhu Anen returned to the Photepan hour ago to consult his Rosetta scrolls.”

“And Mistress Eris?” he asked.

Camille grinned. “Kalli’s returning from taking rubbings from the deadstones on the eastern slope of the mountain. She should be back soon.”

Kallista Eris, Camille and Ankhu Anen had spent hundreds of fruitless hours attempting to translate the graceful, flowing runes that wove around the deadstones. So far, they had met with limited success, but if anyone could decipher their meaning it would be this triumvirate.

“Are you any closer to translating the script on the stones?” asked Lemuel, waving a hand at the ancient menhirs.

“We’re getting there,” said Camille, dropping her bag beside his and lifting the picter from around her neck. “Kalli thinks it’s a form of proto-eldar, rendered in a dialect that’s ancient even to them, which will make it next to impossible to pin down an exact meaning, but Ankhu Anen knows of some works on Prospero that might shed some light on the runes.”

“On Prospero?” asked Lemuel, suddenly interested.

“Yes, in the Athenaeum, some big library the Thousand Sons have on their home world.”

“Did he say anything about the library?” asked Lemuel.

Camille shrugged, taking off her glare shields and rubbing her gritty eyes. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

“No reason,” he said, smiling as he saw Kallista Eris approaching the circle of deadstones, and grateful for the distraction.

Wrapped in a flowing white jellabiya, Kallista was a beautiful, olive-skinned young woman who, did she but desire it, had the pick of the male remembrancers attached to the 28th Expedition Fleet. Not that there were many remembrancers attached; the Thousand Sons were ruthlessly selective in choosing those allowed to accompany their campaigns and record their exploits.

In any case, Kallista declined every offer of companionship, spending most of her time with Lemuel and Camille. He had no interest in a liaison with either woman, content simply to spend time with two fellow students of the unknown.

“Welcome back, my dear,” he said, moving past Camille to take Kallista’s hand. Her skin was hot, the fingers charcoal stained. She carried a drawstring bag over one shoulder, rolled up sheets of rubbing paper protruding from its neck.

Kallista Eris was a student of history, one whose field of expertise was the manner in which knowledge of the past was obtained and transmitted. Once, in the library aboard the Photep, she had shown Lemuel holo-picts of a crumbling text known as the Shiji, a record of the ancient emperors of a vanished culture of Terra. Kallista explained how its factual accuracy had to be questioned, given that its author’s intent appeared to be the vilification of the emperor previous to the one he now served. The veracity of any historical text, she explained, could only be interpreted by understanding the writer’s intent, style and bias.

“Lemuel, Camille,” said Kallista. “Do you have any water? I forgot to take extra.”

Lemuel chuckled. “Only you would forget to take enough water on a world like this.”

Kallista nodded, running a hand through her auburn hair, her skin reddening even beneath her sunburn. Her green eyes sparkled with amused embarrassment, and Lemuel saw why so many desired her. She had a vulnerability that made men alternately want to protect or deflower her. Strangely, she seemed oblivious to this fact.

Lemuel knelt beside his pack to retrieve a canteen, but Camille tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Save it, looks like we’re getting some brought to us.”

He turned and lifted a hand to shade his eyes, seeing one of the Astartes walking towards them with a bronze, oval-shaped vase held out before him. The warrior’s head was bare, apart from a trailing topknot of black hair, and his golden-skinned features were curiously flat, his eyes dark and hooded like a cobra’s. Despite the heat, Lemuel shivered, catching a flicker of cold power hazing the warrior’s outline.

“Sobek,” said Lemuel.

“You know him?” asked Camille.

“Of him. He’s one of the Scarab Occult, the Legion veterans. He’s also Captain Ahriman’s Practicus,” he said. Seeing Kallista’s look of incomprehension, he added. “I think it’s a rank of proficiency of some sort, like a gifted apprentice or something.”

“Ah.”

The Astartes warrior halted, towering over them like a solid slab of ceramite. His battle armour was gloriously intricate, the crimson plates engraved with geometric forms and sigils that Lemuel recognised as similar to those woven into his banyan. Sobek’s right shoulder-guard was stamped with a golden scarab, while the left bore the serpentine star icon of the Thousand Sons.

In the centre of the star was a black raven’s head, smaller than the scarab, yet subtly given more relevance thanks to its positioning within the Legion’s symbol. This was the symbol of the Corvidae, one of the cults of the Thousand Sons, though he had been able to glean precious little of is tenets during his time with the 28th Expedition.

“Lord Ahriman sends this hes of water,” said Sobek. His voice was sonorous and fulsome, as though produced in a deep well within his chest. Lemuel supposed the peculiar Astartes tone was due to the sheer volume of biological hardware within his body.

“That’s very gracious of him,” said Camille, holding her hands out to receive the hes.