Deathfire Read online

  Novels

  Book 1 – HORUS RISING

  Book 2 – FALSE GODS

  Book 3 – GALAXY IN FLAMES

  Book 4 – THE FLIGHT OF THE EISENSTEIN

  Book 5 – FULGRIM

  Book 6 – DESCENT OF ANGELS

  Book 7 – LEGION

  Book 8 – BATTLE FOR THE ABYSS

  Book 9 – MECHANICUM

  Book 10 – TALES OF HERESY

  Book 11 – FALLEN ANGELS

  Book 12 – A THOUSAND SONS

  Book 13 – NEMESIS

  Book 14 – THE FIRST HERETIC

  Book 15 – PROSPERO BURNS

  Book 16 – AGE OF DARKNESS

  Book 17 – THE OUTCAST DEAD

  Book 18 – DELIVERANCE LOST

  Book 19 – KNOW NO FEAR

  Book 20 – THE PRIMARCHS

  Book 21 – FEAR TO TREAD

  Book 22 – SHADOWS OF TREACHERY

  Book 23 – ANGEL EXTERMINATUS

  Book 24 – BETRAYER

  Book 25 – MARK OF CALTH

  Book 26 – VULKAN LIVES

  Book 27 – THE UNREMEMBERED EMPIRE

  Book 28 – SCARS

  Book 29 – VENGEFUL SPIRIT

  Book 30 – THE DAMNATION OF PYTHOS

  Book 31 – LEGACIES OF BETRAYAL

  Novellas

  PROMETHEAN SUN

  AURELIAN

  BROTHERHOOD OF THE STORM

  THE CRIMSON FIST

  PRINCE OF CROWS

  DEATH AND DEFIANCE

  TALLARN: EXECUTIONER

  Many of these titles are also available as abridged and unabridged audiobooks. Order the full range of Horus Heresy novels and audiobooks from blacklibrary.com

  It is a time of legend.

  The galaxy is in flames. The Emperor’s glorious vision for humanity is in ruins. His favoured son, Horus, has turned from his father’s light and embraced Chaos.

  His armies, the mighty and redoubtable Space Marines, are locked in a brutal civil war. Once, these ultimate warriors fought side by side as brothers, protecting the galaxy and bringing mankind back into the Emperor’s light. Now they are divided.

  Some remain loyal to the Emperor, whilst others have sided with the Warmaster. Pre-eminent amongst them, the leaders of their thousands-strong Legions are the primarchs. Magnificent, superhuman beings, they are the crowning achievement of the Emperor’s genetic science. Thrust into battle against one another, victory is uncertain for either side.

  Worlds are burning. At Isstvan V, Horus dealt a vicious blow and three loyal Legions were all but destroyed. War was begun, a conflict that will engulf all mankind in fire. Treachery and betrayal have usurped honour and nobility. Assassins lurk in every shadow. Armies are gathering. All must choose a side or die.

  Horus musters his armada, Terra itself the object of his wrath. Seated upon the Golden Throne, the Emperor waits for his wayward son to return. But his true enemy is Chaos, a primordial force that seeks to enslave mankind

  to its capricious whims.

  The screams of the innocent, the pleas of the righteous resound to the cruel laughter of Dark Gods. Suffering and damnation await all should the Emperor fail and the war be lost.

  The age of knowledge and enlightenment has ended.

  The Age of Darkness has begun.

  ~ Dramatis Personae ~

  The Primarchs

  Sanguinius, The Blood Angel, ruler of Imperium Secundus

  Roboute Guilliman, Master of Ultramar, and the Avenging Son

  Lion El’Jonson, Lord Protector of Imperium Secundus

  Vulkan, Lord of Drakes [deceased]

  Rogal Dorn, The Emperor’s Praetorian

  The XVIII Legion ‘Salamanders’

  Artellus Numeon, Pyre captain, former equerry to Vulkan

  Nomus Rhy’tan, Voice of Fire and Keeper of the Keys

  Phaestus Var’kir, Igniax Chaplain

  Ushamann, Librarius Epistolary

  Orhn, Firedrake

  Ran’d, Firedrake

  Rek’or Xathen, Pyroclast sergeant

  Baduk, Pyroclast

  Kur’ak, Pyroclast

  Mu’garna, Pyroclast

  Zadar, Pyroclast

  Barek Zytos, Legionary sergeant

  Abidemi, Legionary

  Dakar, Legionary

  Igen Gargo, Legionary

  Feron, Legionary

  Kadir, Legionary

  Mur’ak, Legionary

  Ungan, Legionary

  Vorko, Legionary

  Xorn, Legionary

  Far’kor Zonn, Techmarine

  Kolo Adyssian, Shipmaster of the Charybdis

  Arikk Gullero, Lieutenant, first officer

  Lyssa Esenzi, Flag lieutenant, helm officer

  Circe, Navigator

  The XIII Legion ‘Ultramarines’

  Titus Prayto, Master of the Presiding Centuria, Librarius

  Valentius, Legionary sergeant

  Aeonid Thiel, Sergeant, commander of the Red-marked

  Vitus Inviglio, Red-marked

  Bracheus, Red-marked

  Corvun, Red-marked

  Drusus, Red-marked

  Finius, Red-marked

  Gordianius, Red-marked

  Laertes, Red-marked

  Leargus, Red-marked

  Naevius, Red-marked

  Petronius, Red-marked

  Venator, Red-marked

  The XVII Legion ‘Word Bearers’

  Quor Gallek, ‘The Preacher’, former Chaplain, Dark Apostle magister

  Xenut Sul, Unburdened

  Degat, Master sergeant, on board the Monarchia

  Barthusa Narek, Former Vigilator

  The XIV Legion ‘Death Guard’

  Malig Laestygon, Legionary commander

  Ukteg, Sergeant

  Rack, Shipmaster of the Reaper’s Shroud

  The Knights Errant

  Kaspian Hecht

  THE PROPHECY OF THE ONE-EYED KING

  A mountain looms above you, wreathed in mourning cloud. Crags claw upwards, grasping towards a blood-red light at its summit. The sky is ablaze and reflects the mountain’s anger as it casts down flame from above. It is troubled, wounded by those who tried to put it asunder. It rages, and its wrath is terrible to behold.

  A bleak mood is upon you, a hollow mantle that bears more weight than a curse. Your bare feet are blistered and bloody, for you have walked many leagues across the cutting rock of your death world.

  It has not been forgiving.

  But your journey is slowly reaching its end, its conclusion closer with every crimson impression you leave behind you.

  Scarred peaks rise to blot out the sun, though the heat of that glowering orb is still merciless, stealing breath, drying out life until nothing remains but a dusty carcass.

  At the hell-stoked foothills, you begin your ascent. Cinder and hot ash sear your feet, but you barely feel it.

  Hand over hand, the climb is tough, but you are driven beyond the concerns of fatigue. Your mind is a dense, dark pool from which you know you will not resurface. Your body will obey, despite the screaming agony in your limbs, to which you are blind, deaf and dumb.

  You rise with the numbness and monotony of a corpse given life after death, for are you not merely flesh-wrapped despair, your weary bones responding to the last vestiges of your will?

  From the summit you hear a rumble to eclipse the crash of oceans at full swell, a thunderous bellow from the deep earth that echoes across peak and crag. And as your eye is dr
awn to the burgeoning fire glow above, you see a fissure in the flank of the mountain.

  Heat and earth-blood issue from within this crack. The trailing wisps of smoke entice your enfeebled mind, so blighted by a son’s incompar­able sorrow.

  Above you, the rumble of the mountain’s displeasure grows into a roar. Does its anguish resonate with your own, an empathic frequency that has somehow aligned rock and flesh in grief-stricken sympathy?

  Fire rises, soaring upwards in a burning pillar that taints sky, sun and cloud with its fury.

  Desperation seizing your dead man’s limbs, you struggle for the fissure, discovering a cleft wide enough to admit your body.

  And as the heavens weep tears of flame, you enter the mountain to find your sanctuary and your doom. The last image of your existence is obscured by pyroclastic cloud until eventually nothing remains but a shadow and a memory.

  One

  Burnt offerings

  Traoris, the lightning fields

  A body lay in the grey ash.

  Transhuman, male. His skin was the colour of coal, and his batt­ered armour had scalloped edges, as though it had been fashioned from green scales. A Salamander. A sword lay a finger length from his grasp. A warrior. He had met the fate of most who walked that violent road, another corpse amongst many. The wound in his chest the size of a fist had killed him, but his left eye was also badly damaged.

  He hadn’t been reaching for the sword when he died, though. His still fingers grasped for something else. A hammer.

  A flash lit up the sky overhead in veins of pearlescent light.

  An eyelid quivered in response, nothing more than a nerve tremor, the last firing of neural synapses before brain death.

  Another flash. A bolt of lightning struck the earth. Close.

  A finger trembled. Another nerve tremor?

  A third flash, thunder resounded.

  He blinked, the corpse who was not a corpse, trapping a freeze-frame of what was coming for him across the ash. His other eyelid had been cauterised and stayed shut, a ball of throbbing agony harboured behind it.

  Sentience returned, time and place reasserted themselves. Conscious thought resumed. Pain. Much pain…

  Lightning arced from the dry and cloudless sky of Traoris.

  Numeon blinked again as the bolt jerked wildly, splitting into separate arteries and igniting the darkness with violent flashes. Forks of light hit the ground like thrown spears, almost striking his body this time.

  Death would be a mercy. Not because of the pain of his wounds, but the agony of his failure.

  ‘Vulkan…’ Numeon’s voice came out as a dry-throated rasp.

  No, not Vulkan. It had been Erebus, and now his agent had fled with the fulgurite. Grammaticus, the spy. Liar. Traitor.

  Another bolt earthed nearby, and Numeon grimaced. That made five since he had come round. Each belligerent strike brought the storm closer. He had no desire to see what would happen if he remained where he was when a sixth or seventh fork hit the surface.

  Moving was proving difficult. A patch of spilled blood encircled his body, slowly spreading in a dark morass his enhanced physio­logy was impotent to staunch.

  When the Emperor had created His Space Marines, He had made them hardy, but they were not indestructible. Nor were their primarchs, as some poor sons had come to know.

  Numeon would refute the claims of his father’s death, though.

  If he lived long enough.

  His chest was a mess of broken bone carapace and damaged internal organs. He drank and breathed blood, not air. Erebus’s bolt pistol had seen to that. Even being blind in one eye and unable to see it at that moment, he knew his armour was more arterial-red than drake-green. Numeon’s injuries, his near-paralysis, left a stark conclusion.

  I am dying.

  Even transhumans had limits, and Artellus Numeon had reached his. Though his mind rebelled against the prospect of his death, his physical body could not support the lie.

  Another crack of lightning struck close, scorching the earth – just like the bombs and cannons that had rained death upon Isstvan V. Weakly, Numeon turned his head to track the bolt’s trajectory. The flash echoed across his retina, multiplying repeatedly then fading into sharp relief before ultimately dissolving into a memory of sight. In its wake, he saw vortices of harsh grey sand scudding across the wastes of Traoris, like insubstantial djinn of old Abyssinii, carrying the reek of death and the stench of burnt earth.

  Only when the vortices grew larger and became more uniform did Numeon realise it wasn’t just the wind rolling off some distant and unseen sea.

  It was a ship, which meant the Fire Ark could still be aloft, and so he dared to hope.

  During the events that followed, Numeon would learn there was precious little hope left in a galaxy at war.

  A desert stretched away into the distance, endless and black. Crested with high dunes and formidable iron bulwarks, it had become a vista of devastation, thronged with the dead and dying. Some of the fallen lay half buried in blood-soaked sand. Others baked in their armour, slowly burning in the sun. The stink of putrefaction was so ripe it had attained form, a rank and physical mass that weighed heavy on the shoulders.

  It was chaos on the black sand. True chaos.

  Brothers slain.

  Betrayal most foul.

  Details of the massacre fled, as if fearful of being recalled, though they would be forever lodged in Numeon’s eidetic memory. The black of the desert was usurped by the darkness of a cell, the dying screams of his brothers replaced by maddening quietude in which a thought was louder than a shell blast.

  Iron shackles linked his wrists, and snaked to his ankles too. It was hardly necessary. The river of Numeon’s strength had ebbed to little more than vapour.

  He was naked apart from the lower half of his armour’s undermesh sub-layer, the many old wounds and branding scars starkly visible. His battleplate was destroyed anyway, damaged beyond repair. The cold of his cell, the chill of the void bleeding through the bare metal, was as adverse to him as shadow was to the sun. He shivered.

  Rudimentary medical work had been done to reknit his body. It healed, but would be badly scarred. At least the hole in his chest had been stitched back up. His captors had the craft for more effect­ive surgeries; they just wanted Numeon to suffer.

  He suspected it was also why they had left him the hammer.

  It was a relatively simple thing. Short haft, square head, a single jewel stud set into the pommel. Crafted as a piece of ornamentation, it more accurately resembled a fuller, the preferred tool of a black-smiter.

  Humble appearances often belied more esoteric significance. It was more than just a hammer. It was also a symbol.

  For Numeon, now the last warden of the Pyre, it represented hope.

  So grievously wounded, Numeon clung to the sigil of Vulkan as if it were his mortal thread, in the fear that if even one finger slipped then he too would be lost.

  His eye stung with the potency of helfyre, reminding him of that mortality and wrenching him from fanciful notions. Feeling his consciousness slipping, he chose to supplant poetry with fact, using the focus of his thoughts as an anchor.

  Fenrisians had numerous words to describe snow and ice, but those who came from Nocturne, or believed in the Promethean creed, had many ways to define fire, and these terms varied across the seven realms or Sanctuary Cities.

  In Hesiod, known as the Seat of Kings, it was helfyre. In Themis, City of Warlords, they used urgrek. Both were old, lyrical words for the deep magma flows at the nadir of Mount Deathfire, the bubbling heartblood of Nocturne. It was hot, promising crippling agony to any who touched it or even strayed within its stifling aura. Only the deep drakes craved its radiating warmth and the natural solitude it offered, on account of it being anathema to most other forms of life. Protean fire, as described
by inhabitants of the Jewel City of Epithemus, was claimed to be the vital spark that took the souls of the dead, and the husks they had become, and restored them to the world, albeit changed and renewed. Such beliefs persisted in Skarokk, called the Dragonspine, and Aethonion, the Fire Spike, but each realm used a different word, protan and morphean respectively.

  Fabrikarr, as it was referred to in the Merchant’s Sprawl of Clymene, was the forgesmith’s flame, the heart heat that tempers metal, the mundane creator. In the Beacon City of Heliosa it was ferrun.

  Immolus was the world-ender, and all seven cities uttered it the same and often in hushed whispers. For it was the unbound flame, and had been a part of Nocturnean creation myth since before the fabled days of the first Igniax and the metal-shapers of old.

  Numeon knew all their names and every variation across every city, just as he knew the names of countless others and he clung to them as he clung to the fuller’s haft, separating purpose from agony so that he might rise and live.

  Live…

  Not for himself, but for an errant father whom Numeon believed in above all else. His faith – not the tawdry ephemeral faith associated with religion, but the true and honest conviction that something was real in spite of empirical evidence – was the vital force flowing through his veins and the eternal fire igniting his mind. His belief manifested as a simple fact. Two words.

  Vulkan lives.

  The dull grinding of gears brought Numeon out of his deepening torpor. His cell door opened, admitting a thin shaft of light into the darkness that widened as the door climbed and slowly disappeared into an aperture in the ceiling.

  A figure stood silhouetted in the light. His form was power-armoured, further bulking out his broad and formidable transhuman frame. Oath papers bedecked his torso and shoulders like a contagion, but Numeon took care to lower his eyes from what was scrawled upon each strip of flesh-parchment. They were damning words, borne by those who had turned from the Emperor’s enlightenment and embraced old gods. Such things used to be mocked as stories of overactive imaginations.

  No one did so any more.