The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

‘You ask a stone why the wind blows, commander. I don’t know.’

‘I must think on this. Thank you, Custodian.’ The Sister-Commander clicked her fingers, beckoning the girl, and offered Ra a polite bow of farewell.

He didn’t return it. He bowed and knelt only to one man. He did however force a weary smile to Melpomanei, aping the pleasant expression in an attempt to be disarming.

For the first time, Melpomanei spoke without her mistress signing. ‘You look monstrous when you pretend to be human,’ said the little girl.

Ra kept smiling. ‘As do you, soulless one.’

Three Sunlight / First of the Ten Thousand / War council

1

Diocletian Coros stood upon the wall of a fortress that shouldn’t exist, bathed in a halo of unwanted sunlight. While the first natural light to grace his skin in over five years should have been a blessing, he found himself pained by its unwelcome glare. His eyes were far too used to the sunless, skyless half-light of the realm below the Palace.

He wore weariness as a cloak, dulling his senses and pulling at his limbs. Exhaustion burned off him in an aura. The battle was over for now, yet still it leeched his strength. This weakness was new to him. He found that he loathed it.

Here on the high walls, Diocletian scarcely recognised his surroundings. The curving, graceful spires of the Palace’s Ennara Towers were gone, replaced by a grey bastion of rockcrete and plasteel. Its minarets, once things of such stark wonder that pilgrims had been speechless upon seeing them, were ground down into rigid, armoured gun towers with rows of turrets and laser batteries aiming up at the sky. Crews of maintenance servitors, ant-small at this distance, worked under the guidance of robed tech-priests.

It was a truth seen across the city-sized Palace. Walls had become ramparts, towers had been rendered down into battlements, and what had once been the most glorious celebration of human ingenuity now stood as a monument to the species’ capacity for betrayal.

Rogal Dorn and his stone-hearted Imperial Fists had done their work well – the Imperial Palace had been broken apart and reborn as a fortress beyond reckoning. Exalted architecture constructed in dozens of styles over several generations had been ground down under Dorn’s cold gaze, reprocessed into something blunt and crude and inviolate.

A pair of Imperial Fists sentries marched past Diocletian and Kaeria, bolters held at rest. They saluted the Custodian and the Oblivion Knight with the symbol of Unification, banging their fists to their breastplates. Kaeria returned the salute.

Diocletian did not. He watched the two soldiers march on and felt discomfort at the sight of their pristine armour, the very same unease he’d felt upon first seeing the Palace’s horizon turned into an endless ocean of grey battlements.

‘How proud they look,’ Diocletian said. The words came out as a murmur. His voice was still suffering from the blow that had almost severed his head the day before. ‘Our noble cousins.’

Cousins. It was true, if one employed a generous licence with the truth. The warriors of the Space Marine Legions were raised through a similar process to the Ten Thousand, albeit in the coldest and crudest imitation. Diocletian had been reshaped at the fundamental level, with perfection threaded through his blood and bred into his bones. In contrast, his lesser cousins among the eighteen Legions were cut open by knives and implanted with false organs, relying on surgical ingenuity and genetic rituals to mimic the end result of better, more painstaking, more complete, work.

Kaeria said nothing. She shifted slightly, meeting his eyes with her own.

‘True,’ Diocletian allowed, replying as if she’d spoken. ‘They have the right to pride. They have never failed, after all. But there’s no honour in innocence.’

She raised an eyebrow, tilting her head just so.

‘No,’ Diocletian replied at once. ‘Why would I?’

Kaeria’s expression shifted to one of patient doubt.

‘I don’t envy them for their innocence,’ Diocletian admitted, ‘but I’m beginning to hate them for it.’

Kaeria raised an eyebrow.

‘I know it’s petty,’ Diocletian snapped. ‘That’s enough of your judgement, if you please.’

With their faces bared, the Terran melange of their heritage couldn’t be denied. Diocletian was a child of the Urshan Steppes, with the dusky skin and curiously light-brown eyes of that region’s males, the latter standing as evidence to pre-Unity programmes of genetic processing. In paler contrast, Kaeria had the sun-bronzed olive flesh of the Achaemenid region, light of eye and dark of hair. The high topknot atop her shaven head showed tawny streaks in the thin Terran daylight.

Both bore the scabbed gashes and discolorations of recent battle. The walking wounded, returning to the surface with a grave tale to tell.