The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

Ra shook his head. ‘I have no way of knowing the emotions at hand, sire. I have no brothers.’

‘I was being rhetorical, Ra.’ The boy took a breath. ‘This night was significant not for the murder, but for the deliverance of justice. For my uncle’s deed, I stopped his heart’s function and forced him to die. In eras to come this will be called the lex talionis, the law of retaliation, or more simply “an eye for an eye”. It is justice itself. Hundreds of human cultures through time will embrace it. Some will do so out of brutality, others from ideals that they believe to be fair and enlightened, but it is a precept that runs through the marrow of our species.’

Ra pulled his gaze away from the weeping humans. He heard his sire’s words, he knew the history and philosophy behind them, but the reason for them yet eluded him. His doubt plainly showed on his face, for the boy inclined his head in recognition.

‘I told you that this is where it all began,’ the boy said.

‘Culture?’ the warrior replied. ‘Civilisation?’

The boy’s momentary silence told Ra that he had guessed wrong. ‘We are not far removed from those beginnings, Ra, either in distance or time. You could walk to the cradle of civilisation from here, where men and women made the very first city. When I leave this village, that is where I will go. That journey is coming soon. But no, that is not what I mean when I speak of beginnings.’

The boy turned the skull over in his hands, just as he had done in the hut before. ‘This is where I first learned the truth behind our species. This very eve, as I held my father’s skull and considered how to restore his features according to our burial rites. When I learned of his murder, it was a revelation into the heart of all of mankind. This is a world that has no need of you yet, Ra. It has no need for Imperial bodyguards, for it is a world that knows nothing of emperors, or warlords, or conquerors. And therefore it knows nothing of unity. Nothing of law.’

‘You speak of leadership,’ the Custodian said.

‘Not quite. Every village already had leaders. Every family had patriarchs and matriarchs. I speak of kings. Givers of law, rulers of cultures. Not merely those who give orders, but those whose decisions keep a civilisation bound together. This was the night I realised that mankind must be ruled. It could not be trusted to thrive without a master. It needed to be guided and shaped, bound by laws and set to follow the course laid by its wisest minds.’

Ra breathed in the humid air of a land that knew nothing of the ravages it would suffer in the centuries to come. He smelled the sweat of the workers and the minerals in the river water, feeling his blood sing at the sensation of a truly unspoiled world. He didn’t admire the crudeness of a people that lacked all but the rudiments of technology, but he felt awed at the species’ humble genesis. To think that the Emperor, revered above all, had risen from such beginnings.

He looked the boy in the eyes, meeting that dark and knowing gaze, and spoke with a suspicion that curled the war-clan tattoos on his cheeks into a slight smile.

‘Did this truly happen, sire? Were you really born here?’

The boy who would be king turned the skull over in his hands, his voice already distant with distraction. ‘I shall barter with the coastal traders that come at the high moon. I will use shells for my father’s eyes.’

‘My king?’

The boy turned to him and spoke in the voice of the monarch he would one day become. He touched his fingertips to the Custodian’s forehead, delivering a jolt of force.

+Awaken, Ra.+

2

Ra opened his eyes. He hadn’t slept, he had merely blinked. A half-second’s span, within which he saw back to the Emperor’s childhood in a time of almost primeval purity. He exhaled slowly as his senses returned to the here and now, among the monuments of a dead empire, within the necropolis of Calastar.

The eldar cathedral was silent around him. Its shattered dome let in the realm’s ceaseless, sourceless light, casting shadows at inconsistent angles and reflecting oddly against the Custodian’s golden armour. Something like mist clung to the ground with a greasy tenacity, whispering when disturbed by the tread of intruders.

And they were intruders here. Of that, there was no doubt.

A statue of an alien maiden stared down at Ra as he trained. She stood in silent reverence, her streaming robes and features sculpted from the same pillar of songspun wraithbone. One of her slender hands was outstretched in pleading benediction, the other rested, palm against her chest, perhaps warding away some unknowable heartache, perhaps simply conveying some alien torment that had once mattered to her worthless, dying species.