The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

Iosos and her artisan servitors worked on scanning, repairing and resealing Diocletian’s battered plate. Sparks sprayed from the acetylene-bright fusion tools in the tech-priest’s fingertips where she pressed them to the wounds. The servitor standing at his back had removed the auramite layering and now worked on reattaching the severed fibre bundle cabling around his right shoulder blade. Once glorious, Diocletian now looked closer to scorched, filthy bronze than Imperial gold.

By contrast, Valdor stood resplendent in wargear that bordered on ceremonial. Although thousands of scratches and scars marked its surface, and although each one spoke of a battle won in the Emperor’s name, they were old wounds long healed. Artificers like Iosos had worked their arcane craft on each armour plate in the months since the Captain-General had last seen war, restoring it to a state of near perfection.

‘What has happened?’ asked Valdor. Hunger for knowledge of the Emperor’s fate was writ plainly across his stern features.

Kaeria answered with a series of brief hand gestures.

‘Routed?’ Valdor shook his head at the madness of her explanation. ‘How can the Silent Sisterhood and the Ten Thousand not be enough to deal with this threat?’

Kaeria repeated the gestures, a touch more emphatically.

‘That’s why we’re here,’ said Diocletian, adding his voice to her avowal. ‘We need more warriors to hold the Impossible City.’

‘What of the Ten Thousand?’

Kaeria and Diocletian exchanged glances. Weary of formality, the Custodian shook his head. ‘There is much I can’t say. So much is forbidden to be spoken here on the surface, even where no disloyal ears might hear. The last few months have taken a brutal toll, moreso than any of the preceding years. The Ten Thousand is gravely depleted. The Silent Sisterhood fares little better.’

He offered the trophy to Valdor. ‘And then there is this.’

It was undeniably a Space Marine helmet. Which was, of course, impossible.

Constantin Valdor turned the relic over in his golden hands, examining every inch of its construction. The helm belonged to no Legion that Valdor could name, and its battered, cracked ceramite was a red worn by none of the eighteen Legions on the battlefield. Sanguinius’ noble sons of the IX were clad in the rich red of arterial blood; Magnus’ traitorous dogs of the XV wore a paler, more austere shade of crimson.

This helm was neither. Its ceramite was a proud scarlet, chipped away to reveal the gunmetal grey beneath and edged with a bronze-like metal so rife with impurities that it resembled brass.

The faceplate was a Mark IV design with significant variation. Its mouthpiece was rendered into a snarling maw, with the respirator grille crafted into clenched iron teeth. The helm’s crests were a twin rise of rigid ceramite reminiscent of the angel wings of the First Legion’s officer elite and the high curves of XII Legion champions, yet these were cruder, straighter than either Legion’s crests, and emblazoned with brass bolts hammered into the red plating.

Each of these elements was unusual but not unprecedented. There were as many variants in armour mark design as there were foundries and forge worlds producing the arsenals of the Legiones Astartes. In that vein the helmet was marked with its forge of origin, but the stylistically jagged rune imprinted behind the right aural receptor wasn’t one that had yet been seen in the Solar System.

‘Sarum,’ said Valdor at last. ‘This was forged on Sarum.’ He looked at Diocletian and Kaeria, though he didn’t hand the helmet back to either of them. ‘World Eaters.’ He breathed the name like the curse it was becoming.

Diocletian nodded in agreement. ‘The dead legionary wore the devoured world on his pauldron, and the back of his head was wretched with the cybernetics so prized by the Twelfth Legion.’

For a time, Valdor said nothing. What was there to say?

‘Tell me everything,’ he ordered at last.

Kaeria’s hands wove a reply in the air.

‘Then tell me all you can.’ Valdor’s voice was cold. ‘Tell me whatever you can before we convene the war council.’

2

Malcador the Sigillite, Regent of Terra, wore the unadorned robes of a Terran administrator. He led the war council, leaning on his eagle-topped staff as if he truly were the ageing councillor he appeared to be.

They gathered in the Sigillite’s private sanctum, a tower that had thus far managed to evade the extensive reconstruction engineered by the Imperial Fists. Its ringed balcony was still open to the Terran night sky, and the shadows of great stone spheres drifted around the spire-top chamber in elliptical orbits, casting their shadows through the tall stained-glass windows. Nine primary globes drifted on heavy anti-gravitic suspensors, each one shaped of Albian whitestone. Dozens of secondary spheres, moons formed from dark basalt, orbited them in symbiotic turn, as though the tower’s highest chamber were the Sun at the heart of the Solar System.