The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Horus closed his eyes again and said, ‘A being like the Emperor does not move gently through the world. His passing leaves a mark, and He left a very big bruise when he left Molech.’

Tilting his head back, Horus let the rain wash his skin. It fell in a hard, violent baptismal. Aximand smelled the smoke from the myriad fires, saw the ruddy haze that was this world’s red dawn.

Lupercal wiped a hand across his face and turned to Aximand.

‘This is where the Emperor left Molech,’ he said. ‘I mean to follow His steps and find what He took from it.’

2

To rouse dreaming gods from their mountain holds was no small thing. The darkness under the earth was cool and the promise of rest seductive. Decades of slumber had made the gods forgetful, but the siren song of war was insistent. Dreams became nightmares. Nightmares became memories. Marching feet, braying horns and thundering guns.

They had been built for war, these engines of destruction, so to sleep away the years was not for them. In red-lit choral chambers, the plainsong of the Legio warhosts was carried to the domed cavern temples of the God-Machines.

Beneath Iron Fist Mountain, holdfast of Legio Crucius, Paragon of Terra’s reactor roused itself as the embers of its fury were fanned and ritual connections made to the command casket of Princeps Etana Kalonice. Nine hundred and forty-three adepts attended her revival, one for every year of the God-Machine’s existence. They intoned blessings of the Omnissiah for her survival and recited a litany of her victories. Carthal Ashur led the songs of awakening from the inviolate summit of the mountain. Binaric subvocalisation inloaded the horrifying reality of Molech’s tactical situation.

At Kalman Point, bastion of Legio Gryphonicus, Invocatio Opinicus added his voice to that of Ashur’s, his basso tones soaring and filling the gradually awakening god-engines with the urge to fight.

Farther north in the Zanark Deeps, where Legio Fortidus buried itself in shadowed catacombs, Warmonger Ur-Nammu beat binary drums, her guttural call to arms a paean of loss and savagery. Treachery on Mars had destroyed her Legio’s brother engines, and these last survivors were intent on vengeance.

Ten thousand Mechanicum priests fed power to the Legio war engines. Their hearts filled with strength, their armour with purpose and their weapons with the scent of the enemy.

War had come to Molech and the world would soon ring to the tread of the god-engines.

3

Alivia Sureka ditched the groundcar when the floodwater blew its motor. The engine block geysered steam and she swore in a language not native to Molech.

No way it was moving. Looked like she was on foot from here.

She’d keep to the back streets and avoid Larsa’s main thoroughfares. Terrified people were fleeing the doomed city and she didn’t have time to waste fighting her way through crowds.

Alivia climbed out the car. Ice cold water reached her knees.

And the day had started so well.

One of Molech’s principal starports and commercia centres, Larsa sat at the end of a wedge-shaped peninsula a few hundred kilometres north of Lupercalia’s white noise. It enjoyed a temperate climate carried over the bay from the jungles of Kush, and was kept fresh with coastal winds from Hvitha in the north.

All in all, Larsa wasn’t a bad place to live.

That had been true until this morning, when the burning remains of an Imperial frigate impacted twenty kilometres off the coast. Larsa’s littoral regions were underwater now, its commercia halls abandoned, its bustling markets and traders swept out to sea.

A foamed lake of debris and corpses engulfed the harbour, and only the greater elevation of the inland port districts had saved them. Disaster control squads were engaged in a desperate rescue effort to save those who might still be alive down there.

Alivia didn’t reckon on them finding anyone.

She’d endured the great flood of antiquity, and while today couldn’t compare to that deluge, she knew this was only going to get worse. A second or third wave would be building out to sea, and could be anywhere from minutes to hours away.

She needed to get back to the hab she shared with Jeph and his daughters. They lived on the edge of the Menach district in a hillside tenement along with another two thousand other port workers. Not the most exotic place she’d ever lived, but certainly better than many could hope to afford.

Alivia knew she ought to grab another transport and get the hell out of Larsa. Should have left the minute she heard the Warmaster was coming. Alivia’s time was short, but a stab of guilt knotted her gut each time she thought of abandoning Jeph and the girls.

She bore a heavy burden of duty, but now she’d acquired responsibilities. Mother. Wife. Lover. Just words she’d thought, cosmetic affectations to enhance her anonymity.

How wrong she’d been.