The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

‘I am sending Diocletian to the surface to requisition more warriors. Whatever he can muster. My king, the Ten Thousand bleeds and the Silent Sisterhood bleeds with us, but if you could leave the Throne for even a brief time, sire, we could press deep back into Magnus’ Folly. We could cleanse hundreds of tunnels.’

‘I cannot leave the Golden Throne,’ said the boy, curt, sharp. ‘That will not change.’

‘Sire…’

‘I cannot leave the Golden Throne. Every route between the Imperial Dungeon and the Impossible City would shatter and flood with warp-born. You would be alone, Ra. Alone and surrounded.’

‘But we could hold until you reached us.’

‘Kadai made the same demand, as did Jasac and Helios before him. Each one of the Ten Thousand represents genetic lore acquired over many lifetimes. Each one of you is unique. A work of art never to be repeated. I am miserly with your lives, when I spend so many others without a thought. I would not order the Ten Thousand into the fire if there was another way.’

‘I understand, sire.’

‘No. You do not.’ The boy closed his eyes. ‘The moment I rise from my place here, mankind’s dreams will die.’

‘As you say, my king.’

The boy held a hand across his face, cradling his pained features. ‘What of the Mechanicum’s work? What of Mendel?’

‘The Adnector Primus is dead, sire. He fell when the outward tunnels began to collapse.’

The boy met Ra’s stare, dark-eyed and cold. ‘Mendel has fallen?’

‘At a nexus junction in one of the primary arterials. He was part of Kadai’s vanguard. I fought my way through to recover his remains.’

The boy’s eyes lost their focus. It was like looking at the shell of a child, the preserved cadaver of a boy lost too young.

‘My king?’ Ra pressed.

‘This is your war,’ said the distracted boy. ‘The Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood must hold the webway. If you fail me, you fail humanity.’

‘I will die before I fail you, Highness.’

Again, the boy winced. A cringe this time, the revelation of pain – fearless but true – flashed in the child’s eyes. It drew him back to the present. ‘Malcador and the Seventh are losing the war for the Imperium,’ he said. ‘That is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy that can be undone as long as I draw breath. The Imperium is ultimately just an empire. Empires can be reconquered, whether saved from ignorance or pulled back from the clutches of traitors.’

Ra’s grin was a crescent of weary misery. ‘We face a great many traitors, my king.’

The edges of the boy’s mouth deepened. Not a smile. Never that. A twitch perhaps. Another wince. ‘There are always traitors, Ra. After the Ten Thousand performed the Asharik Silencing, I told you all that there was one sin far graver than betrayal.’

‘Failure.’

‘Failure,’ the boy concurred. ‘That holds true now, just as it did then, just as it always has. You cannot fail here, Ra. This is the war for humanity’s soul. The webway is its battleground.’

Ra said nothing, for no words would do. He turned to look at this paradise of primitive humanity with their mud huts and their fields and their weaponless hands. Such innocence. Such unbelievable, terrifying innocence.

‘The Sixteenth sails for Terra to crown itself king,’ said the boy. ‘Can you imagine if I allowed that to happen? A weapon, held in the wrong hands, installing itself as the lord of a whole species. Terra would be in ashes before the first sunrise.’

Ra swallowed at the sudden chill in the child’s words. ‘Sire, are you well?’

The boy cast a slow gaze across their surroundings, across the rows of tall crops, around the village where every other man, woman and child was ignoring them as though they no longer existed. ‘This is where I spent my youth, working the soil and bringing life from the ground.’

The Custodian inclined his head, causing the servos in his collar to purr. ‘I have given you my report, sire. Why do you keep me here?’

‘So I may illuminate you,’ the boy replied, speaking with a patience that bordered upon the preternatural. ‘You watched that man die, did you not?’

Ra looked back over his shoulder, where the village folk were gathered around the fallen man, weeping and comforting in a loose, unwashed herd.

‘I did.’

‘That was my uncle. My father’s brother.’

‘You killed him,’ the Custodian said without judgement.

‘Yes. He struck my father from behind with a piece of sharpened bronze too poorly made to even be called a knife. Men had killed one another for generations before my birth, but this was the first slaying that had resonance to me, that changed my existence. It was illuminating.’

He paused for a moment, following Ra’s gaze back to the noisy villagers. ‘The very first murder was also a fratricide,’ he said without emotion. ‘Thousands of years before this, when men and women still owed as much to apes as to the form we know now. But it is curious to me – brothers have always killed brothers. I wonder why that is? Some evolutionary flaw, some ingrained emotional fragility written into mankind’s core, perhaps.’