Nemesis

The warrior’s question struck a chord in the Word Bearer, but he did not acknowledge it. ‘It is the game, Korda. The greatest game. We take steps, we build our power, gain strength for the journey to Terra. Soon…’ He looked up. ‘The stars will be right.’

‘Forgive him, brother-sergeant,’ said a new voice, an armoured form moving out of the mist below them. ‘My brother Lorgar’s kinsmen enjoy their verbiage more than they should.’

Korda bowed and Erebus did the same as Horus crossed the broken earth, his heavy ceramite boots crunching on the blasted fragments of rock. Beyond him, Erebus saw two of the Warmaster’s Mournival in quiet conversation, both with eyes averted from their master.

‘You are dismissed, brother-sergeant,’ Horus told his warrior. ‘I require the First Chaplain’s attention on a matter.’

Korda gave another salute, this one crisp and heartfelt, his fist clanking off the front of his breastplate. Erebus fancied he saw a scrap of apprehension in the warrior’s eyes; more than just the usual respect for his primarch. A fear, perhaps, of consequences that would come if he was seen to disobey, even in the slightest degree.

As Korda hurried away, Erebus felt the Warmaster’s steady, piercing gaze upon him. ‘What do you wish of me?’ he asked, his tone without weight.

Horus’s hooded gaze dropped to the blackened skull in the dust. ‘You will not use such tactics again in the prosecution of this conflict.’

The Word Bearer’s first impulse was to feign ignorance; but he clamped down on that before he opened his mouth. Suddenly, he was thinking of Luc Sedirae. Outspoken Sedirae, whose challenges to the Warmaster’s orders, while trivial, had grown to become constant after the progression from Isstvan. Some had said he was in line to fill the vacant place in the Mournival, that his contentious manner was of need to one as powerful as Horus. After all, what other reason could there have been for the Warmaster to grant Sedirae the honour of wearing his mantle?

A rare chill ran through him, and Erebus nodded. ‘As you command, my lord.’

Was it possible? The Word Bearer’s thoughts were racing. Perhaps Horus Lupercal had known from the beginning that the Emperor’s secret killers were drawing close to murder him. But for that he would need eyes and ears on Terra… Erebus had no doubt the Warmaster’s allies reached to the heart of his father’s domain, but into the Imperial Palace itself? That was a question he dearly wished to answer.

Horus turned and began to walk back down the ridge. Erebus took a breath and spoke again. ‘May I ask the reasoning behind that order?’

The Warmaster paused, and then glanced over his shoulder. His reply was firm and assured, and brooked no argument. ‘Assassins are a tool of the weak, Erebus. The fearful. They are not a means to end conflicts, only to prolong them.’ He paused, his gaze briefly turning inward. ‘This war will end only when I look my father in the eyes. When he sees the truth I will make clear to him, he will know I am right. He will join me in that understanding.’

Erebus felt a thrill of dark power. ‘And if the Emperor does not?’

Horus’s gaze became cold. ‘Then I – and I alone – will kill him.’

The primarch walked on, throwing a nod to his officers. On his command, the lines of melta-bombs buried beneath the hundreds of thousands of survivors detonated at once, and Erebus listened to the chorus of screams as they perished in a marker of sacrifice and offering.

AFTERWORD

Working on the Horus Heresy series, I am often asked about just how much of this stuff we prepare in advance. Because the broad strokes of Horus Lupercal’s betrayal and the galactic civil war that followed it have already been documented, there’s occasionally a suggestion that – in some fashion – we already have all of this story stored somewhere, codified and arranged, ready to be written out by the authors when the moment is right.

Not so. There exists no great library of all the acts of the Horus Heresy.

And while the end point at the Siege of Terra is certainly known and unchangeable, the markers along the road to get there are not as well defined. Some events, like the Word Bearers attack on the Ultramarines at Calth, or the battle of Signus Prime (which I wrote about in Fear to Tread) are firmly placed in the timeline, while others are more like flags planted in sand.

And then there are the stories that evolved out of the act of writing the Horus Heresy itself – tales that might never have been put to paper if they hadn’t been brought into focus by the presence of other stories around them.

Nemesis is one of those. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a tale of assassins, it’s a creature of shadows, created out of light falling on a totally different story, but still connecting to the greater whole.