Ashes of the Imperium: The Scouring, Book 1, page 1
Contents
Cover
The Horus Heresy
Ashes of the Imperium
Dramatis Personae
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
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
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Horus Rising’
Backlist
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
Horus Lupercal is dead. Killed by his father in a final, desperate act upon the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit.
The Emperor is entombed on the Golden Throne. Humanity cries out for Him to lead them through the darkness, but the Master of Mankind remains silent.
The Space Marine Legions, once mighty enough to conquer the stars, are shattered and leaderless. Those traitors who survive run for their lives, seeking to escape retribution. Already they turn on each other.
The Imperium’s fate is just as uncertain. The brotherhood of primarchs, first broken by Horus, begins to fracture further. Some wish for unity, others hunger for vengeance at any cost.
While in the shadowed chambers of the Imperial Palace, a more insidious threat to the Astartes grows. Humanity, weary of transhuman war, dares to dream of a galaxy without Space Marines.
It is a time of reckoning. The glories of the Great Crusade have been extinguished by the treachery of the Horus Heresy. Ashes of the Imperial dream are all that remain.
The Scouring has begun.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The Primarchs
Roboute Guilliman – Primarch of the XIII Legion ‘Ultramarines’
Rogal Dorn – Primarch of the VII Legion ‘Imperial Fists’
Vulkan – Primarch of the XVIII Legion ‘Salamanders’
Leman Russ – Primarch of the VI Legion ‘Space Wolves’
Lion El’Jonson – Primarch of the I Legion ‘Dark Angels’
Jaghatai Khan – Primarch of the V Legion ‘White Scars’
The XIII Legion ‘Ultramarines’
Titus Prayto – Chief Librarian
Eikos Lamiad – Tetrarch of Ultramar-Konor
Verus Caspean – First Captain
Istrian – Lieutenant
Demet Valita – Captain, Courage Above All
Alajo Dohel – Shipmaster, Courage Above All
The VII Legion ‘Imperial Fists’
Archamus – Master of Huscarls
Sigismund – Emperor’s Champion
Josiqa Urvo – Phalanx Magos Residentia
The IV Legion ‘Iron Warriors’
Ortag Theokon – Warsmith, 37th Grand Battalion
Alescu
Mnon
Lokata
Dhaj-Gol
Taragandeon
The XVII Legion ‘Word Bearers’
Adraharsis – Dark Apostle, Ebon Claw Chapter
Nastron
Uxidas
Cavali
Ur-Adjo
Borduk
Volas
Jaddust
Rivash
Khal-Hanam – Dark Apostle, White Suns Chapter
The XVI Legion ‘Sons of Horus’
Vardesh Kraiya – Chief Apothecary
Ezelas Kul – Lieutenant
Xhamaddon – Lieutenant
Heliosa-78 – Legion-bound Gene-witch
Other Legiones Astartes
Atok Abidemi – Draaksward, the XVIII Legion ‘Salamanders’
Corswain – Seneschal, the I Legion ‘Dark Angels’
Bjorn – Einherjar, the VI Legion ‘Space Wolves’
Raldoron – First Captain, the IX Legion ‘Blood Angels’
Morovain – Captain, the IX Legion ‘Blood Angels’
Senatorum Imperialis
Simion Pentasian – Master of the Administratum
Nemo Zhi-Meng – Choirmaster of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica
Niora Su-Kassen – Lord High Admiral of the Imperial Navy
Zagreus Kane – Fabricator General Locum
Harr Rantal – Grand Provost Marshal
Adreen – Lord Commander Militant
Ossian – Chancellor of the Imperial Estate
Bolam Haardiker – Paternoval Envoy
Talons of the Emperor
Constantin Valdor – Captain-General of the Legio Custodes
Amon Tauromachian – Custodian
Aristea – Custodian
Aphone Ire – Sister of Silence
Kaeria Casryn – Sister of Silence
Within the Palace
Khalid Hassan – Chosen of Malcador
Moriana Mouhausen – Chosen of Malcador
Zaranchek Xanthus – Chosen of Malcador
Amendera Kendel – Chosen of Malcador
Kyril Sindermann – Iterator
The Lost and the Damned
Julatta – Cult demagogue
Hienris – Iconarch
Thalis – Troop commander
CHAPTER ONE
The error of history is to assume greater awareness of circumstances at the time than ever existed; to imagine those of the past knew precisely and with insight what was the case then, what was about to be the case, and what they must do to bring about their desired outcome. So it must be with those days, the days I have made my own study. Will the age come to have its own marker, as the Age of Heresy now has? Will the period become a byword for some particular human failing or accomplishment? Surely it will. And yet, even now, so long after the ashes have cooled, I do not know what it shall be. I propose this, with caution: the Age of Confusion. Or maybe, the Age of Ignorance. For it was this way; there was no certainty, and no ready means of discovering it. As a gravely wounded Terra emerged from its seven-year trial into the fog of a new era, be sure of this one truth: nobody, not a soul, from the greatest of generals to the humblest of soldiers, had the faintest idea what to do next.
– Diomedon of Luna, A Study of the Reconstruction
Now run. Run hard. Nothing else exists. Run, then run some more. You will be doing it forever now.
Those were the words, in the rare moments of clarity, the brief pauses in the headlong rush for doubtful sanctuary. It seemed that this was just the start, the movement into a new way of life that would become eternal. Was death preferable? Maybe another fighter would have thought so. They might have turned, weapons held wide, bracing in defiance before the crash of fury-surf that would dash them away.
But he was not made that way. None of his Legion had been made that way. Iron within, iron without. Live. Survive. Fall back, regroup, rebuild. No pity – not for self, not for any living thing. Run. Run hard. Find a place, a distant place, where you can turn at last, and do so from strength.
A place will be found. It will. That was the other truth: the wheel shall turn. Only live long enough to see it.
So run. Run now. But no, not forever.
He had once had a reputation. The earth itself moulded and turned under his hands, they had said. He would gaze at a landscape, a terrain, a scarp that rose and fell like a drape of cloth, and know how to bend it to his will. He would gauge the substrates, the underlying strata and the surface conditions, his grey eyes glittering while his body was held perfectly still under the glow of massed augur readings.
After a minute, or an hour, or days – however long it took – the orders would come. He would signal for the machines to roll into their positions. The drills would start up, the shafts would be delved, the courses dug out. Pumps would begin to churn, soundings would be made. As he continued to observe, arms folded across his chest now, patient, still silent, the levies of slave labour would march into position, tools at the ready. The earth would be changed. It would protest – the screams and bellows of upended stone, the crack of ancient sediments being wrenched into the open – but his will was the mightier. Always, the mightier. The earth was his servant; he was its master.
Thus it had been before the great schism, the years in which
Bitter, they had been called. Resentful, reclusive. Well, there was a reason for that. A host of reasons. And the Emperor, for all his sins, had never forged a weapon without a purpose. You needed to be bitter to do this work. You needed to put your back into it, to channel all that surliness, to direct the force of it into the soil. Because the deep places were bitter too. They were foul and they were deep, the accumulated spoil of a thousand buried lifetimes, all of it stinking, pulling at your boots and dragging at your shoulders. Only the sour-souled endured that. Only a stomach of wormwood could out-spite the earth.
So they twisted and changed the worlds they found. They sunk their fingers into them and made the terrains into stages of death. Sometimes it was defensive – earthworks and palisades against which armies broke like sheets of glass. Sometimes it was offensive – encircling trenches that covered the advance of the Great Machines and suffocated the life out of enemy fortresses. The result, in the end, was the same. Corpses rotting into the mulch, walls slumping into the mud, war engines condemned to slow rust, and the banners of the IV Legion – the Iron Warriors – raised high once again.
It was methodical. It was patient. It had been perfect, so perfectly planned, from start to finish, the product of a mind of hard genius, and one under whom he had been so proud to serve.
The Master of Sieges. That’s what they’d called him back then. Ortag Theokon, the Earth-Tormentor. Honoured among a people who only honoured the most strenuous arts, those of the tool and the instrument, the gauge and the theodolite.
What did it mean any more? There would be no building now. No patient remaking of the earth. Only running, headlong, panicked.
The humiliation of it. The raw, unbearable humiliation. That was the worst wound, far worse than any physical flesh-breaking.
Run. Feel the abjectness, the white-hot shame. Run hard.
He’d got close, though. He still remembered it all, vivid as a shell-burst in his mind – the Palace itself. Months of toil it had taken to get that near, and at times the fatigue had been too crushing even for them, but they’d made it eventually, cresting the slag heaps with their engines and gazing at last upon the wounded prize.
By then, Terra had been sunk deep into the oily embrace of the warp and everything was shifting under their feet. You’d fight your way down a processional for a week only to find yourself back where you’d started, or pursue the enemy into a dead end only to find yourself ambushed by hundreds more spilling out from new roads that had never been on the cartoliths. It had sickened him, he remembered, making him frustrated and impatient. His master had long quit the field, perhaps out of the same disgust, leaving only the most committed of the IV behind. Theokon had hauled his engines out of cussedness towards the end, losing thousands of slaves with every painful advance, no longer caring about the waste, just committed, absolutely committed, to being there when it mattered.
And he had been. He’d seen the pinnacles of the final redoubt with his own eyes, swimming amid an ocean of empyreal saturation. He’d got near enough to train his guns on their faltering structures. He’d been poised to level them all, just as he’d levelled so many other fortresses in the past.
For a moment, for one intense moment, he’d revelled in it. They had won. They had won. The sacrifice, the compromises, the pain – it had been worth it at last. The Tyrant would be overthrown, the Reign of the Astartes Unfettered would begin, and this time the Imperium would be constructed and maintained without lies or compromises.
Theokon did not know if he had ever been happy, not like they said the baseline humans were capable of being, but that moment surely got close. He’d grinned under his rusted helm, felt all the fatigue melt away, clenched his fist high. The moment he unclenched, the engines would go to work – the earth would shake, the sky would split, his accumulated hatred would pour onto those walls and render them down to ashes.
He never got to give the order. It had all happened so suddenly, so completely, so utterly without warning. The entire vista had rocked, slammed over, flexed, shuddered. The crimson skies had flared, the stars had blazed. Fires had leapt up from the earth, spontaneous, almost gleeful. These were no munitions, no fresh weapons firing – this was the universe itself in both rapture and agony, a shaking of its primordial foundations, a snapping-back of reality like a dislocated limb being reset.
The daemons were torn out of reality, howling with horror and disbelief. The warp sky exploded and then gusted back into darkness. A great crack rang out from horizon to horizon, deafening for a split second, blinding for a mere instant, then just an echo – the resumption of physical law, the wrench of the immaterium being hauled away.
Elation was replaced, instantly, with terror. Real fear. A whirl of vertigo, of stomach-churning horror. Hardened Space Marines around him fell to their knees, dropped their weapons, looked to the heavens in dumb amazement. Theokon himself staggered, all thoughts of conquest suddenly gone, barely noticing as the greatest of his precious engines disintegrated from within. A gale whipped up, churning dust and ashes into the already filthy skies. Rumbles of collapse juddered across the poisoned soils. A greater roar rose, gathering strength, resounding and voluminous, coming now from far, far above. So he looked up at last, barely aware of himself or where he was, and saw them: the enemy, not crawling across the landscape in scraps and rags but swarming from the heavens, rank upon rank of them – drop pods, landers, heavy carriers laced with friction lightning. Where had they come from? Who were they? How was this happening?
‘Fall back!’ came a cry, a strangled outburst of wild astonishment.
Theokon might have resisted that, but then the bombardment began – curtains of fire, vengeful fire, lancing down from the hurtling atmospherics, crackling and splitting the air itself. The concentration of it was phenomenal, as if ranks of calderas had tipped out their white-hot contents in unison, dousing the surface in a tide of sizzling ingots even as more were lined up to come.
So he ran. He turned heavily, slipping in the already-boiling mud, limping back the way he’d come, along with all the rest of them, sliding and skidding and dropping to all fours, leaving weapons, leaving shields and trophies, dropping it all, forgetting it all, just scrambling out of that inferno before the waves of pain overtook them and dissolved them down to nothing.
The battlefront was vast – kilometres and kilometres of terrain crammed with millions of troops and vehicles – but the onslaught was everywhere, at all points, sudden and unrelenting. Theokon’s helm display quickly overloaded, immediately crammed with so many threat signals that he blinked it off. He was panting, gasping for oxygen. He felt very cold, even as the air shimmered with heat from the bombardment.
It wasn’t fighting. It wasn’t any kind of contest. It was a rout, an immediate rout, a switchback of vicious, unprecedented severity. Whole squads, whole battalions, were consumed as they attempted to turn. Those engines that had not already been destroyed were now hunted and disabled. The drop pods plunged into the sickened earth, bracketed with insane levels of covering fire, then the doors slammed open and the hunters spilled out.
He never even saw the insignias on those doors – he never knew who was killing them all. He felt as if he might be weeping as he ran, as if he might be dying from the inside out, as if the shame would burst his hearts. He saw Krathos killed, his lieutenant blown up by charges as he tried to scale a sliding dune face of wreckage. He saw Llax and Fidec ripped apart, their limbs and weapons thrown wildly into the air. He kept going, breaking into a heavy run, his boots churning up the blood and oil that saturated the dust. The sky lit up again, then again, then flared permanently white, erasing shadows, picking them all out in savage clarity.
Somehow he got back to the earthworks, the reserve lines. He got a snatched glimpse of the lower plains beyond, the ones they’d spent months fighting across, the badlands they had conquered with so much loss and determination, now a seething mass of bodies fleeing the other way. Millions of them. Billions of them. Mutants, beasts, mortals, Astartes, screaming and slipping and going mad. No daemons. None. All gone, all pulverised. He saw the once-possessed limping around in agony and terror, their sundered souls amputated back to wholeness.
