The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

‘I’m one of Malcador’s chosen,’ said Loken. ‘I’ll send word to the Sigillite and have you taken back to Terra. I’m not letting you rot away in here another minute.’

‘Garviel,’ said Mersadie, and her use of his given name stopped him in his tracks. ‘They’re not going to let me out of here. Not for now, at least. I spent a long time in the heart of the Warmaster’s flagship. People have been executed for a lot less.’

‘I’ll vouch for you,’ said Loken. ‘I’ll guarantee your loyalty.’

Mersadie shook her head and folded her arms.

‘If you didn’t know who I was, if you hadn’t shared your life with me, would you want someone like me released? If I was a stranger, what would you do? Turn me loose or keep me imprisoned?’

Loken took a step forward. ‘I can’t just leave you here. You don’t deserve this.’

‘You’re right, I don’t deserve this, but you don’t have a choice,’ said Mersadie. ‘You have to leave me.’

Her hand reached up to brush the bare metal of his unmarked plate. Thin fingers traced the line of his pauldron and swept across the curve of the shoulder guard.

‘It’s strange to see you in this armour.’

‘I no longer have a Legion,’ he said simply, angry at her wilful desire to languish in this prison.

She nodded. ‘They told me you died on Isstvan, but I didn’t believe them. I knew you were alive.’

‘You knew I’d survived?’

‘I did.’

‘How?’

‘Euphrati told me.’

‘You said you didn’t know where she was.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Then how–’

Mersadie turned away, as though reluctant to give voice to her thoughts for fear of his ridicule. She bent to retrieve the presentation case from the ground next to the mattress. When she turned back to him, he saw her eyes were wet with tears.

‘I dreamed of Euphrati,’ she said. ‘She told me you’d come here. I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but after all I’ve seen and been through, it’s almost normal.’

The anger drained from Loken, replaced by an echoing sense of helplessness. Mersadie’s words touched something deep within him, and he could hear the soft breath of a third person, the ghost of a shadow in a room where none existed.

‘It isn’t ridiculous,’ said Loken. ‘What did she say?’

‘She told me to give you this,’ said Mersadie, holding out the case. ‘To pass on.’

‘What is it?’

‘Something that once belonged to Iacton Qruze,’ she said. ‘Something she said he needs to have again.’

Loken took the box, but didn’t open it.

‘She said to remind Iacton that he is the Half-heard no longer, that his voice will be heard louder than any other in his Legion.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mersadie. ‘It was a dream, it’s not like it’s an exact science.’

Loken nodded, though what he was hearing made little sense. At least as little sense as answering a summons to war on the word of a dead man.

‘Did Euphrati say anything else?’ he asked.

Mersadie nodded and the tears brimming on the edge of her eyes like a river about to break its banks spilled down her cheeks.

‘Yes,’ sobbed Mersadie. ‘She said to say goodbye.’

EIGHT The Eater of Lives / Confrontation / Hope in lies

1

The apothecarion decks of the Endurance were cold, bare metal and reeked of the embalmers art. Acrid chemicals fogged the air and hissing vats of noxious fluids bubbled on retorts between dull iron slabs, suspended cryo-tubes and racks of surgical equipment.

Mortarion had spent altogether too much time here already in the pain-filled days following the attack of Meduson’s sleeper assassins. Swathed in counterseptic wraps and bathed in regenerative poultices like an embalmed king of the Gyptia, his superhuman metabolism had taken only seven hours to undo the worst of the damage.

A squad of Deathshroud Terminators escorted him through the artificially cold space with their manreapers gripped loosely. The primarch’s honour guard lightly rocked their outsized scythes from shoulder to shoulder to keep them in motion. Even on the flagship, they were taking no chances.

Frost webbed the canted hafts and the light of organ-harvesters glittered from the ice forming on the blades. Armoured in dusky white armour edged in a mixture of crimson and olive drab, they spread out in a pyramid formation, threat auspex alert for the intruder they knew was somewhere on this deck.

Mortarion went bareheaded, fresh skin grafts flushed with highly-oxygenated blood that made him look healthier than he had in centuries. A rebreather gorget still covered the lower half of his face, and gusts of earthy breath sighed from its portcullis-like grille. His sockets were craters cut in a lunar landscape, his eyes nuggets of amberglass.

Silence was clamped to his armour’s backplate. He had no need of its edge, the Deathshroud had more than enough to go round. Instead, he carried the Lantern, a colossal Shenlongi pistol, drum-fed and possessed of an energy matrix few beam weapons of comparable size could match.