Vulkan Lives Read online

  The Horus Heresy®

  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 XVIII Legion ‘Salamanders’

  Vulkan, Primarch, the Lord of Drakes

  Artellus Numeon, Pyre Captain, and Vulkan’s equerry

  Leodrakk, Pyre Guard

  Skatar’var, Pyre Guard

  Varrun, Pyre Guard

  Ganne, Pyre Guard

  Igataron, Pyre Guard

  Atanarius, Pyre Guard

  Nemetor, Captain, 15th Company Reconnaissance

  K’gosi, Captain, Pyroclast of the 21st Company

  Shen’ra, Techmarine

  The VIII Legion ‘Night Lords’

  Konrad Curze, Primarch, the ‘Night Haunter’

  The X Legion ‘Iron Hands’

  Ferrus Manus, Primarch, the Gorgon

  Domadus, Battle-brother and unofficial quartermaster

  Verud Pergellen, Legionary sniper

  The XIX Legion ‘Raven Guard’

  Corvus Corax, Primarch, the Ravenlord

  Hriak, Librarian, Codicier

  Avus, Battle-brother

  The XVII Legion ‘Word Bearers’

  Erebus, Dark Apostle, disgraced First Chaplain

  Valdrekk Elias, Dark Apostle, sworn to the service of Erebus

  Barthusa Narek, Huntsman, former legionary Vigilator

  Non-Legion personnel

  Seriph, Remembrancer

  Verace, Remembrancer

  Caeren Sebaton, Frontier archaeologist

  From scorched earth…

  ‘Vulkan lives.’

  Two words. Two grating words. They closed around me like a rusty trap, snaring me with their savage teeth. So many dead… No, slain. And yet…

  Vulkan.

  Lives.

  I felt each one reverberate inside my skull like a triphammer striking a tuning fork, pressing at my temples, every syllable pulsing headache-red. They were little more than a mocking whisper, these two simple words, mocking me because I survived when I should have died. Because I lived, they did not.

  Surprise, awe, or perhaps it was the simple desire not to be heard that made the speaker craft his words so quietly. In any case, the voice that gave utterance to them was confident and full of undeniable charisma.

  I knew its cadence, its timbre, as familiarly as I knew my own. I recognised the voice of my gaoler. And I, too, rasped as I declared it to him.

  ‘Horus…’

  For all my brother’s obvious and demonstrative puissance, even in his voice, I could barely speak. It was as if I’d been buried for a long time and my throat was hoarse from swallowing too much dirt. I had yet to open my eyes, for the lids were leaden and stung as if they’d been washed out with neat promethium.

  Promethium.

  The word brought back a sense memory, the image of a battlefield swathed in smog and redolent of death. Blood saturated the air. It soaked the black sand underfoot. Smoke clung to banners edged in fire. In fragments, I recalled a battle unlike any other that I or my Legion had ever fought. Such vast forces, such strength of arms, almost elemental in their fury. Brothers killed brothers, a death toll in the tens of thousands. Maybe more.

  I saw Ferrus die, even though I wasn’t present at his murder, but in my mind I saw it. We had a bond, he and I, forged in more than fraternal blood. We were too alike not to.

  This was Isstvan V that I saw. A black, benighted world swarmed by a sea of legionaries bent on mutual destruction. Battle tanks by the hundreds, Titans roaming the horizon in murderous packs, drop-ships flooding the sky and choking it with their death-smoke and their engine fumes.

  Chaos. Utter, unimaginable chaos.

  That word had a different meaning now.

  Further snatches of the massacre returned to me. I saw a hillside, a company of battle tanks at the summit. Their cannons were aimed low, firing off ordnance into our ranks and punishing us against the anvil.

  Armour cracked. Fire rained. Bodies broke.

  I charged with the Pyre Guard, but they soon lost pace with me as my anger overtook my capacity for reason. I hit the tanks on my own at first, like a hammer. With my hands I tore into the line of armour, battered it, roaring my defiance at a sky drenched crimson.

  As my sons caught up to my wrath, light and fire arrived in the wake of my assault. It tore open the sky in a great strip of blinding magnesium white. Those nearby shut their eyes to it, but I saw the missiles hit. I watched the detonation and beheld the fire as it spread across the world like a boiling ocean.

  Then there was darkness… for a time, until I remembered waking, but dazed. My war-plate was burned. I had been thrown from the battle. Alone, I staggered to my feet and saw a fallen son.

  It was Nemetor.

  Like an infant I cradled him, raising Dawnbringer aloft and crying out my anguish for all the good it would do. Because no matter how much you wish for it, the dead do not come back. Not really. And if they do, if by some fell craft you can restore them, they are forever changed. Revenants. Only a god can bring back the dead and return them to the living, and we had all been told that gods did not exist. I would come to understand the great folly and undeniable truth of that in the time that followed.

  My enemies reached me in a flood, stabbing with knives and bludgeoning with clubs. Some were midnight-clad, others wrapped in iron. I killed almost three score before they took Nemetor from my arms. And as I knelt there, bruised and bleeding, a shadow fell across me.

  I asked, ‘Why, brother?’

  And these next words were freshest in my memory, because of what Curze said as he loomed over me.

  ‘Because you’re the one who’s here.’

  It wasn’t the answer I was expecting. My question had a much wider meaning than what Curze took it to be. Perhaps there was no answer, for isn’t it inevitable that one day a son will rebel against his father and desire to succeed him, even if that succession meant committing patricide?

  Though my eyes were gummed with blood, my helmet gone, I swore I saw Curze smiling as he looked down on me as at one of his slaves.
The bastard. Even now, I believe he found it amusing. All the horror, the dirty shame of treachery and how it stuck to all of our skins. We primarchs, we who were supposed to be the best of all men, turned out to be the very worst.

  Konrad had always enjoyed irony like that. It brought us all down to his level.

  ‘You are full of surprises.’

  At first I thought it was Curze again – my sense of time and space was colliding but not connecting, making it hard to focus properly – but he never said that to me at Isstvan; he never said anything else after that moment.

  No, it was Horus speaking. That cultured tonality, that deep basso which had made this treachery possible. Only he could have done it. I just didn’t know why. Not yet.

  I opened my eyes at last and saw before me the patrician countenance of a once noble man. Some would call him a demigod, I suppose. Perhaps we all were in our different ways, but then gods were supposed to be superstition honoured by lesser, credulous men.

  And yet here we all were. Giants, warrior-kings, superhuman in every aspect. One of us even had wings; beautiful, white, angelic wings. Looking back now, I cannot fathom why no one looked at Sanguinius and wondered if he were really a god.

  ‘Lupercal,’ I began, but Horus cut me off with a mirthless laugh.

  ‘Oh, Vulkan, you really were badly beaten.’

  He was armoured in black, a suit I had only seen him wearing once before and which bore no resemblance to either the Luna Wolves of his origin, or the Sons of Horus that he led afterwards. As much as he wore it, the black also bled off him in waves like it wasn’t armour at all but some dark anima enclosing him. I had felt it before, caught some inkling of the man he was becoming, but to my shame did nothing to prevent it. An eye glowered in the midriff, blazing and orange like Nocturne’s sun but without the honest heat of natural fire.

  He gripped my chin with a taloned power fist, and I felt the claws pinch.

  ‘What do you want with me? To kill me, like you killed my sons? Where is this place you have me imprisoned?’

  As my eyes adjusted, healing through the gifts my exceptional father gave me, I saw only darkness. It reminded me of the shadow Curze cast over me when I was at his mercy on the plains of Isstvan.

  ‘You are right about one thing,’ Horus said, his voice changing as I grew more lucid, becoming gradually sharper and more rigid, ‘you are a prisoner. A very dangerous one, I think. As to my purpose,’ he laughed again, ‘I honestly don’t know yet.’

  I blinked, once, twice, and the face before me transformed into another, one I could scarcely believe.

  ‘Roboute?’

  My brother, the primarch of the XIII Legion Ultramarines, had drawn a gladius. It looked ceremonial, never blooded.

  ‘Is that who you see?’ Guilliman asked, eyes narrowing before he slid the blade into my bare flesh.

  Only then did I realise that I was unarmoured, and sense the fetters around my wrists, ankles and neck. The gladius bit deep, burning at first but then growing colder around the wound. It was sunk into my chest, all the way to the hilt.

  My eyes widened. ‘What… what… is this?’

  Breath knifed through my lungs, bubbling up through the blood rising in my throat, making me gurgle.

  He laughed. ‘It’s a sword, Vulkan.’

  I gritted my teeth, anger clamping my mouth shut.

  His voice changed again as Guilliman leaned in close and I could no longer see his face, but felt his charnel breath upon my cheek.

  ‘Oh, I think I am going to like this, brother. You definitely won’t, but I will.’

  He hissed as if savouring the thought of whatever tortures he was already concocting, and it put me in mind of soft, chiropteran wings. My jaw hardened as I discovered the true identity of my tormentor, his name escaping through my clenched teeth like a curse.

  ‘Curze.’

  Persona non grata…

  A figure armoured in crimson stumbled into the chamber as if through a cut in a veil, a literal knife-thrust that parted realities and allowed him to escape into blessed darkness.

  Valdrekk Elias had been waiting in the sanctum, waiting for days for his master’s return. It was foreseen, his humbling at the Warmaster’s hands. It was known that Horus would challenge the Pantheon and it was known that his own father would forsake him. A martyr’s cause was not for him, however. He was destined for greater and everlasting glory.

  So it had been told to Elias, and so he had waited.

  Now he cradled a wretched figure in his arms, torn and broken, savaged by the very warriors who were meant to be his allies.

  ‘Blessed master, you are injured…’ Elias’s voice trembled, in fear, in shame, in anger. There was blood all over the floor. Rivulets of dark red ran into sigils marked upon the iron tiles, casting off an eldritch glow as each engraving was filled with blood.

  Elias muttered to keep the lambent glow from growing into something he could not control. He doubted his master would be of any use at that moment. The chamber was a holy sanctum; blood should not be spilled there idly.

  Head bowed, facing the floor, his master was shaking and mewling in pain. No… it wasn’t pain.

  It was laughter.

  Elias turned him over and saw the ruin of Erebus’s face, white eyes staring from a skull wrapped in blood-soaked meat. His red-rimed teeth chattered in a lipless mouth, clacking together in a rictus grin before parting as he breathed.

  Elias looked at him aghast. ‘What has been done to you?’

  Erebus tried and failed to answer, spitting up a gobbet of crimson.

  Disciple lifted master, carried him in both arms despite the weight of his war-plate, holding his partly insensate form across his body.

  Parting with a blast of escaping pressure and the whirr of concealed servos, the sanctum doors opened into a corridor. The apothecarion was close.

  ‘A lesson…’ Erebus croaked finally, gurgling his words through blood.

  Elias paused. Blood was dripping with a steady plinking rhythm as it struck the deck plates underfoot. He leaned in, the stink of copper growing more intense as he closed. ‘Yes?’

  ‘A lesson… for you.’

  Erebus was delirious, and barely conscious. Whatever had been done to him had almost killed him. Whoever had done it had almost killed him.

  ‘Speak it, master,’ Elias whispered with all the fervour and devotion of a fanatic.

  Erebus might have lost favour in some quarters, with his father certainly, but he still had supporters. They were few, but they were also ardent. The Dark Apostle’s voice shrank to a whisper. Even for one with Elias’s enhanced hearing, words were difficult to discern.

  ‘Sharpen ours, blunt theirs…’

  ‘Master? I don’t know what you are saying. Tell me, what must I do?’

  With a strength belied by his frail condition, Erebus seized Elias by the throat. His eyes, those ever-staring lidless orbs of pure hate, glared. It was like he was peering into Elias’s tainted soul, searching it for any vestige of falsehood.

  ‘The weapons…’ he gasped, louder, angry. He laughed again, as if this were a truth he had only just realised, before spitting up more blood.

  Elias’s gaze went to the athame clutched in his master’s claw-like hand. It was only because the fingers were bionic that he still held the ritual knife at all.

  ‘Weapons?’ Elias asked.

  ‘We can win the war. They are all… that matters.’ He sagged, the Dark Apostle’s passionate fire finally usurped by his injuries. ‘Must have them or deny them to our…’ Erebus trailed off, falling into unconsciousness.

  Elias was without compass. He didn’t know what to do, but trusted in the divine will of the Pantheon to guide him. Quickly, he took Erebus to the apothecarion and as soon as the Dark Apostle was on the slab and in the tender care of his chirurgeons, El
ias opened a vox-channel.

  ‘Narek.’

  The voice that answered was harsh and grating.

  ‘Brother.’

  Elias knew that the athame was powerful. He was not some novice unschooled in the art of the warp. He knew full well what it could do. He possessed his own, a mere simulacrum of the one in Erebus’s clutches, as did his lesser apostles. But he had always wondered if other such artefacts existed in the universe. Other ‘weapons’, he now supposed.

  Elias smiled at the thought of obtaining one, of the power he might hold with it.

  ‘Brother,’ Narek repeated when Elias didn’t answer straight away.

  Elias’s smile turned into a broad grin that didn’t reach his eyes.

  ‘Ready your warriors. We have much work to do.’

  CHAPTER ONE

  Disciples

  ‘The struggles of warring gods are oft fought not between themselves, but through their disciples.’

  – Sicero, ancient Terran philosopher

  Traoris was described by some as a blessed world. Blessed by whom or what was open to interpretation. The facts that were known were simply these. In the year 898 of the 30th millennium of the Imperial calendar, a being came to Traoris who was known as the Golden King.

  Hailed as a liberator, he banished the dark cults that ruled before his coming. He slew them with sword and storm, an army of knights at his command that were both magnificent and terrifying. The cabal of sorcerer-lords that the Golden King vanquished had enslaved the Traorans, a people who had not known peace or freedom for many centuries, their ancestors having ventured from Old Earth long ago. Alone, isolated during the time of Old Night, Traoris fell victim to a primordial evil. Sin made the minds of weaker men eager vessels for this darkness and only glorious light would remove it.

  And so it was that the Golden King banished darkness, preaching freedom and enlightenment. He touched this world with his mere presence. He blessed it.

  Many years passed, and between the Golden King’s departure and the recolonisation that followed, Traoris was slowly transformed. Gone were the bastions of the sorcerer-lords, great factories and mills rising in their stead. Industry came to Traoris and its people.