Valdor- Birth of the Imperium - Chris Wraight Read online

  Further reading from The Horus Heresy

  HORUS RISING

  Dan Abnett

  FALSE GODS

  Graham McNeill

  GALAXY IN FLAMES

  Ben Counter

  THE SOLAR WAR

  John French

  THE LOST AND THE DAMNED

  Guy Haley

  THE FIRST WALL

  Gav Thorpe

  ROBOUTE GUILLIMAN: LORD OF ULTRAMAR

  David Annandale

  LEMAN RUSS: THE GREAT WOLF

  Chris Wraight

  MAGNUS THE RED: MASTER OF PROSPERO

  Graham McNeill

  Order the full range of Horus Heresy novels, audio dramas and audiobooks from blacklibrary.com

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  The Horus Heresy

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Sons of the Emperor’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  The Horus Heresy

  It was a time of turmoil.

  For thousands of years, Terra was divided, its petty warlords vying for supremacy.

  An Age of Strife reigned, and it was bloody.

  Then came the Emperor…

  Through His will and the armies of savage Thunder Warriors did He bring order to a chaotic world, His desire nothing less than the preeminence of mankind.

  Foremost amongst His soldiers were the Custodian Guard, a peerless warrior brotherhood, His generals and war leaders. The greatest of these was Constantin Valdor, their dauntless captain.

  Unity was inevitable, the tyrants crushed or brought to heel, alloyed under one banner.

  And so the nascent Imperium was born.

  A new era had begun.

  As Old Night faded and the warp storms that had estranged Terra from the distant tribes of humanity abated, the Emperor’s gaze turned to the mastery of the stars themselves.

  New armies were raised, stronger than the old: the indomitable Space Marine Legions.

  Unity had come, and so the Great Crusade then beckoned…

  Transcript

  Retrieved: [Incognita]

  Vector: [Incognita]

  Origin: Luna, transit station Aleph-Null-Null; prior, Imperial Core audex general repository; prior, [Incognita]

  Determination: Uncertain; refer to senior adept

  Canister marker: Store; Mundus est finem

  Classification: Occultis ad mortem

  -- Begins (audex: Gothic antiqua A) --

  S1: Awake?

  S2: [Qua nihil respondente.]

  S1: [Silentium.] Please. Take your time.

  S2: Who…

  S1: Who are you?

  S2: [Nihil respondente.]

  S1: You do not remember your name.

  S2: No.

  S1: Or where you came from.

  S2: No.

  S1: Would you tell me if you did?

  S2: [Silentium.] I… do not know.

  S1: You would. From this day, to the end of all days, you would tell me anything I asked of you, if you knew it.

  S2: [Silentium.] Yes.

  S1: So. What can I give you?

  S2: [Nihil respondente.]

  S1: Information. Data. In the days to come, that may be all I can give you. I can already feel it creeping up. You pay a price for all things, and this is mine – I will become less than human.

  S2: Less than?

  S1: And more. There was a saying, an old one – no such thing as a free lunch. [Ridens.] You make one bargain, become stronger. You make another, become weaker. It applies to mortals. It applies to gods. Not that I intend to become one.

  S2: I do not– [Intermissum.]

  S1: Forgive me. I have been alone a long time. I can talk, if allowed to. You need to know certain things, now.

  S2: Yes.

  S1: There is a grand bargain here.

  S2: I understand it.

  S1: Do you? Already? Good. Very good. What is the bargain?

  S2: [Silentium.] Infinite power cannot be overcome. We are finite, limited by law. So, deception.

  S1: Do you find that unworthy?

  S2: No.

  S1: Because it comes from me.

  S2: Yes.

  S1: Speak freely. For once, speak freely. You are only just awakened – there may be few chances left for you.

  S2: [Silentium.] You will cheat them. You will cheat all of them. And us.

  S1: A risky strategy.

  S2: There are no others.

  S1: You understand it. And, tell me – do you understand the full implication?

  S2: Ruin. Total ruin.

  S1: Good. And, now, tell me this – knowing all this, knowing the risks, the likely outcome, why did I make you?

  S2: [Silentium.]

  S1: Speak.

  S2: [Nihil respondente.]

  One

  Sevuu watched the flyer come in from the west, low across the ravines of eastern Anatolya, a deepening sky at its back. He shaded his eyes with a dry palm, squinting against the glare of the slowly sinking sun. Before him stretched the baking stone­scape of rock and smoulder, still angry, still hot.

  The flyer trailed two lines of dirty smoke. As it neared, dipping in the heat, Sevuu noticed its chipped red hull, its old-style turbine nacelles. It was big – a twenty-seater, maybe – but out of shape.

  Sevuu smiled. Just like her to find a rust-hulk, the kind of thing any out-of-luck merchant prince would scrape up from a salvage yard. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her in a Palace vehicle. All that gold didn’t really suit her.

  He waited, standing still as the dust billowed up around his robes. The flyer extended landing pads, and the turbines swivelled earthwards. In a whine-hail of engines, it came down, kicking up dry soil across the landing site.

  Then he moved, walking gingerly across the rock-strewn field, covering his mouth against the grit with a mesh scarf. The first two people out of the flyer were her guards, chainmail armoured, environment masked, projectile-weapon clutching. Sevuu had never discovered what regiment or detachment she took her close protection from – it was hard, even now, to keep track of all the current, semi-current, legal and illegal military units on a world whose only real occupation for several mortal generations had been killing.

  Then she emerged, waddling down the ramp, swaddled in grey skirts, clomping her heavy boots, eyes hidden behind thick shades. Her hair was tied up, wrapped around in a red scarf, exposing only patches of her dark, tough skin.

  Sevuu went up to her, extending his hands in greeting. She grabbed them both, squeezing hard.

  ‘Sevuu,’ she said.

  ‘Madam High Lord,’ he replied.

  ‘Ready to show me?’

  ‘Everything,’ he said.

  On the journey, two things occurred to him as if for the first time, despite how often he had made the same flight and seen the same things. />
  The first was the vastness of the place. Soon after lifting again from the landing stage, locked down in the flyer’s hold and pressed up against a smeary viewport, he could see the land wrinkle away towards the curved horizon, a mass of cranial defiles and pale orange mesas. The sky was still a pale blue in the west, darkening at the apex of the atmosphere’s dome, and long shadows ran west-east.

  This country had no settled name. It had been depopulated for hundreds of years, just another casualty of chem-clogged warfare and environmental collapse. So much of the globe was the same. Humanity had clung on during the years of strife, crammed within the iron shells of the great coastal cities that now peered across boiled-off seabeds, but not every­where. For hundreds of kilometres, thousands of kilometres, there was nothing now – just the tick of poison-detectors and rad-counters, the scuttle of six-eyed rodents, the brush of a reproachful wind.

  This place, he had been told, had once been called Urartu. There had been kings here, just as there had been kings everywhere – tech-warlords with violent courts, barely deserving the many titles they were given. So far, so unremarkable. You could have said the same about the wild steppes of Asia, the teeming weapon factories of Europa, the hyper-cities of Pan-Pacifica – all at one another’s throats, gripped by the terror and ecstasy of killing.

  But there was something about this place. Something primordial.

  And that was the second thing. The rocks were old here. Very old. The ruins were old. The watercourses were old. You could smell the age, staining everything, humming softly under a surface cocktail of military-grade chemical spills.

  Sevuu was not a historian. There had only been real historians operating on Terra for a short time, ever since He had brought them back into service, and so the past was to him as it was to almost everyone, a blurry mass of myth and conjecture. But you looked at the rocks, here. You ran your finger over them, and you felt where old rainfall had pattered and the hoof-prints of extinct animals were preserved, and you knew. You knew that a story had started here, so long ago that its opening words would never be remembered, but that the story itself still mattered, for it hadn’t finished yet.

  Sevuu looked over at High Lord Uwoma Kandawire, who was not looking through the viewport at the scenery. She was sitting in her chair, small and uncomfortable. Her hands gripped the armrests. She had taken her shades off, and that made it easier to see the unease on her face.

  ‘You have already had a long journey,’ Sevuu said.

  Kandawire glanced up at him, roused from thoughts of her own, then shot him a wry smile.

  ‘You’d have thought,’ she said, ‘that after all we’ve done, all we’ve gone through, we could design an atmospheric flyer that didn’t make me puke.’

  Sevuu nodded. Of course, the High Lord was incorrect. There were plenty of flyers that she could have taken, ones that glided through the air with nary a vibration, air-conditioned and whisper-quiet; but they were ostentatious and expensive and would have been noticed by any of the hundreds of makeshift intelligence operations working both within and without the Palace system. And so she, Mistress of the Lex Pacifica and commander of a bureaucracy of thousands, had made herself pukesome on a rattling hunk of poorly riveted steel. Admirable devotion to the cause.

  ‘Not far now,’ Sevuu said.

  Kandawire pushed her shoulders back, hard into the flaking synthleather padding, and tried to ride the judder. ‘I read your ’slate bulletin,’ she said. ‘Anything to add before we arrive?’

  Sevuu shook his head. ‘Not really. I can’t decide if they were careless, or we were thorough.’

  ‘You were thorough. It’s why I chose you.’

  ‘Or they thought, with some justification, that no one cared enough to look.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘That too.’ For the first time, she looked out of her viewport, where the sky was falling away into that deep, oceanic blue that ushered in sunset. Stars were already visible in the east, tiny points of light purer than any now generated on a spoiled world. ‘I’m grateful to you, that you took this on. I’m mindful of the dangers you all faced.’

  Sevuu bowed, appreciative. ‘It has been fascinating.’

  ‘I feel, to be honest, that I already have much of what I need. Your report was as complete as ever. But I–’

  ‘–needed to see for yourself.’

  Kandawire smiled. ‘We do, don’t we?’ She turned away from the viewport. ‘Even now, that hasn’t changed.’

  A light blinked on the overhead panel, and the flyer began to dip into its descent. The vibration became worse.

  ‘Would anything change your mind?’ Sevuu asked.

  ‘Plenty,’ Kandawire said. ‘I want to be wrong. I always have.’

  The shaking hit a rhythmic stride, marking their descent down to another dirt-blown landing strip bordering what had once, on the edge of a species’ memory, deserved the name civilisation.

  ‘You’re not often wrong,’ said Sevuu.

  They did not ascend the mountain that day.

  By the time they’d come down to the final-stage landing ground, the compound’s security lumens were at full beam and the sun was burning its way into a distant, still war-ravaged, west. Sevuu escorted Kandawire through the streets of his temporary township – a dirty grid of prefab accommodation blocks on the edge of the landing strip, airlifted in two months ago and bolted together against the elements. The wind was blowing from the high eastern scarps, stirring the dust into spirals. Sevuu had donned an environment mask by then, but Kandawire seemed content to wrap her scarf around her face and huddle against the gritty breeze.

  The security detail that met them was from Sevuu’s command – twelve troopers of the Yoyoda Servine 12th, drawn from a regiment that had seen active service nine months ago halfway across the planet and had since been put on less arduous duty to recover. They were good, professional men and women, but Kandawire’s bodyguards looked altogether more threatening as they fanned out across the landing site.

  Sevuu took the High Lord to her quarters – one of the larger units, cleared hurriedly and kitted out with a working heater-unit. She took a single look at it and hid her dismay reasonably well. Then he bade her a good night, closed the doors and double-checked the security details.

  He didn’t sleep much after that. His own quarters were draughty, and once the sun disappeared the temperature plummeted. He reviewed his work. He tried to ignore the clump and bang of armed troops patrolling the perimeter fence. Eventually, he lay on his sagging cot, staring at the ceiling, thinking back over the past weeks of toil and what it all meant, or didn’t mean. Gradually, slinking around the edges of his blinds, sunlight crept back in, and another day had passed.

  Sighing, he got to his feet, washed at the basin, tried to make his crumpled uniform look a little less disgraceful. A shot of recaff and a carb-stick later and he was making his way back to Kandawire’s unit. He knocked on the door. When she opened it, she looked crisp and businesslike, freshly draped in those long robes she always wore, the scarf artfully arranged again – a sky-blue one, this time.

  ‘Sleep?’ he asked.

  ‘Better than you, by the looks of things,’ said Kandawire, gingerly stepping down the metal steps.

  They met their escort – more of the chainmail-armoured soldiers – and took a convoy of six trucks out of the eastern gate and up into the highlands beyond. Five of the carriers were Odion troop haulers, heavy and bolstered with thick metal plating. Theirs was a civilian transport, adapted for the rough terrain and, as a result, boneshakingly uncomfortable.

  The air was crisp and clear, still cold although warming fast. The rockscape stretched away from them in all directions, bare and glistening with the last of the dew. It was a pale brown, like flesh. Ahead loomed their destination.

  ‘Impressive,’ said Kandawire, tilting her shades down and peering over the rim. �
��A suitable location for the drama of it, at least.’

  It was a long trek up the dirt tracks, ones that were barely used by any but the old smuggler-gang remnants. Scrub clung to the margins, black-leaved and sparse. You could still taste the rads here, making the air pungent like spilled spice.

  Ahead of them, it loomed – double-peaked, a sweep of mountain like a white wave. Behind its shoulders marched the badlands of the lesser Caucasus, snow-capped and wind-blasted, but ahead of its skirts there was nothing but more emptiness.

  The mountain. Ararat. Storied since the earliest days of humanity, a name recorded and erased and recorded again in a thousand holy palimpsests, all of them now proscribed and destined for the incinerators.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ Sevuu said, bracing himself against the movement of the transport. ‘Nothing left to fight over. I still don’t understand it.’

  ‘There’s plenty here,’ said Kandawire. ‘On the other side of this range, a few hundred kilometres away, there’s an empire. One responsible for the death of a whole army. We sent it in, it never came out.’

  Sevuu looked at her, startled. ‘Really?’ he asked.

  ‘Even now.’ Kandawire looked like she was enjoying herself. ‘Its days are marked, of course. All these places – their days are marked. We’ll send another army in there, one day. It’s all about choosing the moment.’

  ‘So this was a warning, here,’ Sevuu said, cautiously. ‘A display of strength.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think the symbolism was more important.’ Kandawire rubbed her elbows to get the blood moving. The bumps and rocking were getting arduous. ‘But, in a way, it’s always been about strength, this whole thing, from beginning to end. The question we should be asking is – what kind?’

  ‘And you have an answer to that.’

  ‘I have an answer to everything,’ said Kandawire. ‘The right one, I hope.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  Now they were climbing higher, riding the switchbacked trails over deep defiles. It got hotter inside the transports as the sun climbed with them, boiling off the last of the mists and making the air shimmer. The atmosphere became thin, making the engines labour. It took several hours of shaking and revving across the uneven terrain before, finally, the narrow, embedded shaft of Sevuu’s locator-spear came into view. The transports shuddered to a halt, steaming in the sun’s glare. One by one, the guards disembarked, looking around themselves warily.