THE HORUS HERESY

It is a time of legend.

Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Mankind conquer the stars in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races are to be smashed by his elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons. Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor, as system after system is brought back under his control. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful champions.

First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superhuman beings who have led the Space Marine Legions in campaign after campaign. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation, while the Space Marines themselves are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

Many are the tales told of these legendary beings. From the halls of the Imperial Palace on Terra to the outermost reaches of Ultima Segmentum, their deeds are known to be shaping the very future of the galaxy. But can such souls remain free of doubt and corruption forever? Or will the temptation of greater power prove too much for even the most loyal sons of the Emperor?

The seeds of heresy have already been sown, and the start of the greatest war in the history of mankind is but a few years away...

LUPUS DAEMONIS

Graham McNeill

Nergüi’s first memory of murder was that of his adoptive father.

His young ears pressed to his father’s chest, he remembered the frantic heartbeat as the man carried him from the massacre behind them.

At the time, Nergüi didn’t know who was doing the killing.

Down in the utterdark it almost didn’t matter.

Murder was mundane, killing the norm.

Kill or be killed. Kill them before they kill you.

It didn’t matter who they were. They was anyone beyond the light cast by the stuttering gas-lumens.

They was anyone you didn’t know.

They was everyone who didn’t bear the cut-mark of your clan, your gang, your family.

Even that wasn’t always enough to keep you safe.

Down in the utterdark, life was teeming and cheap. Brothers murdered brothers, parents abandoned children and wives killed husbands.

Back then, Nergüi was too young to know how the world worked in the lightless warrens and filth-choked tunnels infesting the planet’s bedrock like maggots in mouldy bread. All he knew was the beating of the man’s heart, a man who had become his adoptive father only moments ago.

A man who looked as surprised by that turn of events as anyone.

Nergüi remembered shouts, guttural and hot, like the volcanic heat of the deep mines.

No real sense of their meaning, but he understood the fear behind them.

Fear that had brought the Marrow Tearers with serrated knives to the clan cavern.

And even barely out of swaddling clothes, he understood that hate was fear’s twin.

His father stumbled and fell, vomiting a froth of blood and black bile.

Splintered bullet fragments had pierced his lungs. Both were rapidly filling with fluid. He set the child in his arms down and drew a rusted punch dagger. Shadows moved on the soot-stained walls. Gutting knives flashed, fresh-sharpened edges gleaming in the firelight.

Bellowing with rage, his father surged upright and fought.

Because fighting and killing was what you did down in the utterdark.

You fought until your gun ran dry, until your knife dulled and snapped, until your fists were broken.

You only lay down when your heart stopped beating or your skull was bashed open with a rock.

You fought until they cut your throat and laid the mirror coins on your eyes.

He remembered the grunts of grappling bodies, the deafening boom of primitive firearms.

Bright flashes and the taste of bad powder. Fear-stink of butchered meat.

The electric tang of blood in the air.

Father fought hard, but in the end he died.

A ricochet blew out his knee, and a motorised, tooth-bladed axe hammered his side. It tore up through his blood-filled lungs. Nergüi’s father fell beside him, blood pouring from his ruined body.

He died staring into the boy’s shining sea-green eyes with incomprehension.

That was Nergüi’s first memory of murder, but it wouldn’t be his last.

Cthonia was a world built on murder.

A mesh of iron scaffolding, like cobwebs left by a giant metal spider, clung to the painted walls of the Deeprats’ cavern, and looping runs of chain were strung between them like sinews stretched on a drying rack. Lingering fumes from pipe bomb explosions and gunfire hung in acrid screeds.

The rocky floor was slippery with sweat, shit and the wet remains of disembowelments.

Whooping yells from the fresh-blooded Reiver braves filled the air. His fellow clansmen dragged the limp corpses of the Deeprat Clan to the volcanic fissure at the heart of the infernal cavern.

No one knew how deep it was, only that, way, way down, its walls were said to be crusted with precious metals, gems and seams of chem-rich sediment. When Cthonia’s orbit swung it away from the blue sun and her molten heart cooled, it was said a clan could mine a fortune from the depths. Nergüi didn’t know if that was true, but rumour of it had been enough for the Reivers to slaughter the Deeprats and claim their territories.

He watched with a mix of envy and pride as the young men – boys no longer – carved their names into the chests of the enemies they had slain.

Kill-names; earned in murder.

The newly elevated warriors smeared dead men’s blood across their eyes and mouths. They howled like beasts, savage and feral, drunk on slaughter and war-lust.

The corpses, having served their purpose, were dumped into the magma fissure without ceremony. The braves backed away from its brutal heat as Khageddon hauled the mutilated Deeprat chieftain by his topknot to the centre of the cavern.

The beaten man struggled in their Overlord’s grip, wounded and near death, but still alive.

On Cthonia that was never a good thing.

In the utterdark, you were taught to fight so hard they had to kill you.

The tribes and clans of Cthonia were not kind to captives, inflicting tortures so hideous they reduced even the strongest-willed to soiled, gibbering lunatics.

Khageddon’s hulking metal-and-flesh body was slathered in blood, his own and that of the dozen men he’d killed. His own topknot had come loose in the fighting, and long black hair hung like a dark veil over his face. All Nergüi could see of the Overlord’s scarred features was the gleaming silver of his implanted fangs and the pale orb of his machine-eye.

‘Reivers!’ yelled Khageddon. ‘Blood has answered for blood!’

The braves slowly circled him, bent over and beating their callused palms and blades on the rocky floor of the cavern. A low growl built in their throats, guttural and subvocal, wordless but rich with dark meaning. It was the hunt song, a slow rhythm of metal and meat on stone.

Nergüi felt it touch something deep inside his patchwork body, stirring an aching sense of loss; a memory long forgotten. Or a future he didn’t yet understand.

He yearned to join his clansmen, to howl in the pack circle.

But he wasn’t yet battle-blooded, and anyone without a kill-name joining a pack circle would be set upon by the braves. Cut to pieces without even the dignity of mirror coins for their eyes.

Khageddon lifted his ritual knife, a long blade left by one of the takers of the dead.

Its edge never dulled, and no matter how much blood it spilled, the red-rust never touched it.

‘Aebathan!’ yelled the Overlord, and drew the blade across the Deeprat’s throat.

He sawed back through meat and muscle, sinew and bone until the head was cut loose and the body toppled into the fissure.

Khageddon lifted the head and let the red rain from the stump drizzle down over his face before tossing it after the body.

In the ruddy light of the magma fissure, he was monstrous.

Life was cheap on Cthonia. Nergüi had known that all his life.

A man’s whole existence meant less than the blade he carried, the handful of bullets in his pouch, or the fit of his steel-jacketed boots. Nergüi’s life meant less than most.

He’d been told that as long as he could remember.

He was the runt of the clan, a freak of scars. A survivor of wounds no child could possibly survive.

A boy whose body refused to grow and develop like the others.

Some called him a curse, a changeling left by the evil spirits at Cthonia’s heart to torment them.

They all wished him dead, but the Overlord had forbidden it.

Khageddon had found him hung from a hook in an abattoir cave of the Corpse Grinders, a skin-masked butcher in a blood-stiffened apron readying him for a greased spit. Khageddon had gutted the man before lifting the boy from the hook and carrying him back to Reiver territory.

No one knew why and he had never given a reason for saving the infant with shining sea-green eyes.

Down in the dark, everyone’s eyes were a dull and sickly blue. Terms like biodiversity were unknown to the Reivers, but everyone knew that different meant bad.

Different meant you were an outcast. Shunned.

Many were the days Nergüi wished the Overlord had left him to die on that hook.

Khageddon had called him that, a meaningless name from the dead language of Cthonia’s first deep miners. One that literally meant no name.

‘It is for protection,’ said Khageddon on one of the rare days he bothered to speak to Nergüi.

‘Protection from what?’

Khageddon looked to the roof of the cave, and his pearlescent eye clicked and scratched as the mechanism seized. A shadow of regret passed over his face.

‘From the future,’ he said.

Anger touched Nergüi and made him reckless. ‘I don’t need protection,’ he spat.

Khageddon backhanded him with a savage blow that knocked him down and loosened his teeth.

‘I did not say it was for your protection.’

No more was said on the matter.

The Deeprats had been an old clan, one that liked to hold onto the past, to remember.

They hoarded useless things in recesses cut into the painted walls of their caves: old books, scraps of paper, and identical crystals that were good for nothing but hand-catapult ammunition. The pages of the books were gummed together with greenish damp, and the papers were simply long lists of numbers that kept decreasing.

He lifted one of the crystals, an angular blue cube with swirling gold veins threading its interior, and lifted it to his eye. The surface was cloudy and scratched, but Nergüi saw a web of impossibly complex patterns in its depths that looked too regular to be natural.

Nergüi shrugged and placed the crystal in the pouch of his tunic.

The other clans mocked the Deeprats for their hunger to know the past, but Nergüi would have given anything to know more about where he had come from. He had no memory of his mother, nor any knowledge of a father save the nameless man who’d tried to save him as an infant.

Khageddon was the closest thing to a father he had, and the Overlord’s hate for him was palpable.

The Reivers hated him too, but if he read the look in their eyes when they thought he wasn’t looking, they feared him as well, though he couldn’t think of a single reason why they should.

Nergüi circled the cave, running his hand along the wall and tracing the telling of a story painted onto the rock beneath his palm. The mural was faded and the artwork crude, though how he knew to judge it so he wasn’t sure. It depicted the harsh blue sun of Cthonia burning above a desolate landscape of soaring machine towers that split the planet’s bedrock and greedily drank its bounty.

The farther along the wall he went, the closer the towers grew, until the horizon was filled with their insatiable hunger. Each tower had a groove chiselled into the rock beneath it, and Nergüi traced their looping lines. These represented the mine workings, an endless network of tunnels that had cut deep into the planet and hollowed it out like scavengers picking a carcass clean.

Between the towers were blocky figures, men who travelled the stars in cities of stone and steel.

The old-timers spoke of seeing starships in their youth, titanic monsters of blue fire and fury.

Nergüi longed to see one, to one day behold a field of stars instead of the dripping oil and soot-stained ceilings of rock that were all you saw when you looked up in the utterdark.

But these days, nobody went to the surface.

Why would they? The sun burned your skin, the air tasted bad and the blue-eyed ghouls haunting the ruins preyed on the living for sport. Anyone who went to the surface never came back.

But the thought of something existing beyond the squalid darkness below the surface was like an itch Nergüi just couldn’t scratch, a thought that wouldn’t go away no matter how much he chased it.

‘This can’t be all there is,’ he whispered.

His finger followed a groove back to the planet’s surface and kept going, past the soaring towers, up into the darkness of space and beyond. He circled Cthonia’s star and spiralled outwards onto bare rock.

The Deeprats hadn’t painted anything beyond the blue orb, their imagination unable to conceive of what wonders might exist outside of what they could see or what they remembered of the old tales.

Nergüi closed his eyes, picturing skies of blue and green, alien shores of crystal silver, ancient structures of polished granite gleaming beneath a golden sun. He inhaled, tasting the salt spuming on ocean waves breaking against cliffs of basalt, and smelling the loam of rich earth in which living things might grow. The hairs on his arms rippled with the sensation of warm winds over endless plains of high grass, where the air was so crisp and clear it tasted of cut glass.

‘One day I will see such sights,’ he said. ‘One day I will see the skies of these far-off worlds.’

The sensations were so acute, the liminal space between memory and imagination became meaningless. In his mind’s eye he saw a soaring range of snow-capped mountains at the roof of the world, where a single tower pierced the clouds.

A light burned in its tallest window like a beacon, calling to him…

‘I know you,’ he said, the breath quickening in his throat.

‘Talking to yourself again, freak?’ said a voice behind him.

Memory, imagination and reality crashed together once more, and Nergüi turned to see four of the freshly blooded braves behind him. Karaamat and his friends, Oromegon, Nyla and Barsine.

He hadn’t heard them enter, and he was normally so careful in being aware of his surroundings.

Karaamat circled the cavern, glancing disdainfully at the mural and the scraps of the old world the Deeprats had preserved. The boy was around twelve or thirteen years old, powerfully built, and with a half-moon scar over his right eye. Oromegon was his brute twin, and like his brother, wore his long hair in a leather-wrapped topknot.

Nyla and Barsine kept their hair long at the top and back, but shaved at the sides, with long scalp locks woven with hooks and nails. Nergüi had always thought the girls beautiful, in the same way that a well-forged knife could be beautiful.

‘What are you doing here, no-name?’ demanded Karaamat.

‘Nothing,’ said Nergüi. ‘Just looking around.’

‘You shouldn’t be here, this is my cave now.’

‘It is?’

‘Yeah, didn’t you see? We got blooded today.’

Karaamat proudly slapped a hand on the clan markings freshly cut into the hardness of his pectorals. Ash had been smeared into the wounds to scarify them and permanently mark him as a proud killer of the Reiver Clan.

Nergüi nodded. ‘I saw, yeah. Killed three men, they say.’

Karaamat rounded on him, anger twisting his face into something bestial. His hook-bladed knife appeared in his hand, the blade still dull with the rust-brown stains of murder.

‘What do you mean, they say? You doubt me, no-name? You think I didn’t kill ’em? I’ll gut you for sayin’ so!’

Nergüi took a step away from Karaamat, pressing himself against the wall.

‘No, Karaamat, no way. I just mean that’s what I was told. You know, because I didn’t go on the raid. Khageddon wouldn’t let me.’

‘That’s right,’ spat Karaamat. ‘You ain’t blooded. Never gonna earn a kill-name, neither.’

‘Because none of the older braves will train me.’

‘Yeah, you ain’t strong enough to be trained,’ said Oromegon, flexing the powerful muscles in his chest and arms. ‘Looks like your body got all broke up, and they didn’t put you back together so good.’

‘He’s the runt of the pack,’ said Nyla, picking up a mildewed book and flicking idly through its pages without comprehension. Rotted scraps of paper fell from within as the pages disintegrated, and Nergüi felt an unexpected stab of anguish to see the knowledge the book contained so casually lost.

‘Please, don’t do that,’ he said, and instantly regretted it as her lip curled in a sneer.

To show you cared for something was to show weakness.

If you cared for something, an enemy could hurt you with it.

Nyla threw the book at his feet and said, ‘It’s junk, no-name. Ain’t good for nothin’ but burning.’

Nergüi bent to retrieve it, and met Karaamat’s knee as he cannoned it up into his face.

His head snapped back, cracking painfully on the wall.

Blood sprayed the mural from his broken nose. Blinded by pain, he fell back onto his haunches, hands flying to his face. He curled into a ball as they fell upon him, driving their boots and fists into his chest and stomach. He kept the muscles tense and his breathing shallow as he waited for it to end.

Pain was nothing new to him, nothing new to anyone on Cthonia, so he gritted his teeth and took it.

This wasn’t his first beating, and it likely wouldn’t be his last.

‘Scream, no-name!’ yelled Karaamat, hauling him upright and brandishing his blade. ‘Why don’t you ever scream?’

‘Maybe we ain’t hurting him enough,’ suggested Oromegon.

‘Yeah, cut one of them scars open!’ added Nyla.

Oromegon wrenched his arms painfully to the side as Nyla ripped open his tunic. He let her do it.

Fighting would only make things worse, give them an excuse to kill him.

His chest and belly exposed, his pale skin was ridged with scars. These were wounds that would have killed any tribal warrior thrice over, but even a youngblood of Cthonia could see these weren’t the wavering lines of shivs or picks, nor the scars of bullet tracks.

These were scars cut with care and precision, a weaving pattern that spoke of artifice and science beyond anything to be found in the utterdark, even among the insane tech-seers who dwelled down in the magma caverns.

‘You got put together, no-name,’ hissed Nyla. ‘That’s why you got no mama.’

Oromegon laughed. ‘Someone stitched you together from all the runty bits left over after the Corpse Grinders were done with some downdark tribe, I reckon.’

‘Then threw you out because you was so useless,’ finished Karaamat.

Nergüi had heard all the insults before, had seen the looks of disgust whenever people saw his scarred flesh, pale and veined like a corpse drained by the feral blood-feasters.

He locked his eyes onto Karaamat and something passed between them, some invisible connection.

A glint of defiance, perhaps. Or, worse, indifference to this beating.

It touched some hitherto untapped well of rage within Karaamat. His eyes widened, and he pistoned his fist into Nergüi’s face. The blow cracked his cheek and slammed the back of his head against the floor of the cave. Another blow split his lip and splintered teeth flew from Nergüi’s mouth.

Again and again Karaamat’s fist slammed into his face.

The others backed away, suddenly fearful of his rage. To Nergüi, it seemed as though some potent force was working through the young brave, driving his fists with lethal intent.

‘Kara!’ said Nyla. ‘That’s enough! You’re gonna kill him!’

Karaamat ignored her, raining down blows with one purpose only. Murder.

Nyla pulled his shoulders, but he was too strong. Too intent on this beating.

‘Leave him be,’ she yelled, drawing her bone-handled knife. ‘Khageddon says he’s marked. You don’t kill no marked soul, do ya?’

She grabbed his topknot and pulled his head back, ready to cut his throat. Instead of resisting her, Karaamat roared and surged backwards. Her dagger spun away, clattering to the rock floor beside Nergüi. He rolled onto his side, coughing teeth and blinking away blood.

He saw Karaamat drive Nyla against the opposite wall.

Saw the girl’s face contort with pain.

Her legs buckled and she slid down the wall, Karaamat’s hooked blade buried to the hilt in her heart.

She was dead before she hit the ground.

‘Nyla!’ cried Barsine.

Karaamat pushed her back. Murder-lust was in his eyes. He’d already killed three people today, now a fourth. None of them wanted to be his fifth.

Karaamat let out a shuddering breath and stared at each of them.

‘Shit, Kara, you killed Nyla…’ said Oromegon.

‘I never liked her anyway,’ he said, bending to twist and pull his knife from the dead girl’s chest. He wiped it clean on Oromegon’s tunic before turning and pushing past him.

He turned as he reached the cave’s entrance, pointing the gleaming blade at Nergüi then at Nyla.

‘Get rid of her before I get back,’ he said.

Nergüi watched Nyla’s body tumble down the fissure until it was lost in the red glow of the magma far below. He felt nothing for her; he hadn’t liked her and she hadn’t liked him. So why had she risked a confrontation with Karaamat for him?

No answer presented itself, and he supposed he’d never know.

She was dead and no one would say any words for her. No one would miss her and she would be forgotten within a day. That was the Cthonian way. No ties, no cares, no loyalty.

It was no way to live.

Nergüi turned her knife over in his hand. Too valuable to get rid of – more care than was usual had gone into its making. Its handle had once been a thigh bone, and its grip was carved with thunderbolts originating from a selenite pommel in the shape of a crescent moon.

He could feel the eyes of the clan upon him, but death was so woven into the everyday fabric of the utterdark, that no one thought it strange for him to be dumping a body like this. So callous a disregard for the loss of one of their own sickened Nergüi. That was nothing new, of course; life on Cthonia was nothing to be celebrated or cherished.

Any one of the tribe would place more value on the knife he held than Nyla’s life.

The fundamental imbalance of that seethed like a coal in Nergüi’s heart.

Everything he had learned and everything he had been taught told him that life in the utterdark was nothing but a brutal struggle for survival. The strong killed the weak. Anything else was meaningless.

It was how things had always been and how they always would be.

Cthonia was dying, but its people would fight till their last breaths to kill each other.

Where was the sense in that?

He lifted his head, seeing layers of fumes above him, swirling as they were drawn up through cracks in the ceiling. High above, ancient tunnels, likely bored as ventilation for the deep mines, still pulled currents of air through them, freighted with the hard metallic flavours of the surface. Hints of steel and the biting-on-tin taste of age-old technologies, the tang of archaic sciences.

He felt a shadow move behind him, recognised the scents and sounds of Khageddon.

‘Did you kill the girl?’ he asked.

‘Her name was Nyla.’

‘I have already forgotten her name. Did you kill her?’

‘No, Karaamat did.’

‘Why?’

‘Does it matter? Who needs a reason to kill down here?’

‘You’re right,’ agreed Khageddon. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

Nergüi turned to face the Reivers’ Overlord. ‘Then why ask?’

‘Because you think it matters. You seek to find sense and meaning where none exists, to graft higher purpose onto those who have none. The only purpose we have down here is to fight and kill, to take what we need from those weaker than us. Anything else is irrelevant.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Nergüi. ‘This world and everyone on it… we used to be part of something, part of something greater than… this. Fighting like rats in a cage, killing each other like it doesn’t matter who lives or who dies.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Khageddon. ‘Nothing matters. Not you, not me. Nothing. The struggle is all there is. It is all that matters. We fight, we kill and we die. What more does there need to be?’

Nergüi looked back at the rock ceiling through the fumes, imagining his mind’s eye flying up through the thin clefts and fissures in the crust of the planet’s bedrock that led to the surface.

‘We were meant for something more than this,’ he said. ‘I was made for something more than this.’

‘Perhaps you were,’ said Khageddon, placing a hand on his shoulder.

For the briefest second, Nergüi thought the gesture almost paternal.

Then he felt the pressure of the Overlord’s grip.

And realised Khageddon was thinking of pushing him into the magma fissure.

He should have been afraid, should have fought to free himself, but Nergüi felt neither fear nor anger, only a weary acceptance of this fate.

What use was survival when life was worth nothing?

Why struggle when only more pain and suffering was the reward?

The grip on his shoulder tightened, and Nergüi felt a strange tension wracking Khageddon through his palm. It spoke of a struggle within his soul, a war between the desire to push Nergüi to his death, and something… something even he didn’t understand.

A bass rumble of shifting rock groaned through the cave, like distant thunder over a far horizon.

Something flashed in the depths of the fissure, like discharge from a power-coupler.

Khageddon’s grip loosened on his shoulder. He stepped away from the boy.

Without turning, Nergüi said, ‘Why?’

‘Cthonia spoke to me,’ said Khageddon.

The only light beneath Cthonia was that of fire and crackling spots of fading lumens left over from the time when men had plumbed its depths for riches. Those days were long gone. The planet’s wealth had been stripped away, its deep mines played out, and only scraps remained in the darkest, most lethal cracks of the world.

The empty tunnels and clefts remaining in the rock were bleak and dusty, hung with swaying chains and crusted with ancient machinery too large to scavenge. The walls were knapped like flint where the drills and picks of long-dead pioneers had hacked the rock until Cthonia had nothing left to give.

The planet’s once limitless wealth was exhausted.

Now only one resource remained in abundance…

But to what purpose could such human wretchedness be set?

Nergüi kept close to the lights, but not too close.

Light meant people, and he was far enough from Reiver territory that those people would all be enemies. Cthonia’s inhabitants were forever on the move, so he couldn’t be sure to which tribe the lights belonged, and to walk into a rival tribe’s camp without a blood-host would be as sure a death sentence as if he leapt blind into a depthless chasm.

Even death alone in the dark would be a kinder end than seeking succour from a tribe not his own.

He climbed ever upwards.

He ascended sheer cliffs of basalt, sprinted across swaying chain bridges while the masked toll-keepers emptied their bowels, and climbed creaking ladders of flaking iron beaten into the rock to pass through hatches long since rusted open.

Every step carried him farther into the unknown reaches of the world.

But still he instinctively knew the way.

Up. Always up.

Children of Cthonia learned to navigate the labyrinthine tunnels as infants.

As infants, they were abandoned in the darkness and left to fend for themselves. A child either found their way back to the clan or they died a slow, agonising death from dehydration, starvation and madness.

By necessity, Nergüi had learned to be fast and to find the hidden paths through Cthonia’s bedrock.

Hard-won knowledge that now allowed him to safely cross the territories of the Helleboreae and the pack predator Catulans. He was almost clear of Rukal territory, but with their recent slaughter of the Arosokal and their rumoured stockpile of supplies, he hoped their legendary bloodlust would be sated for now.

He heard war drums echoing up through fuming splits in a toothed cavern of dripping stalactites.

Angled beams of pale moonlight speared in from cracks in the roof, and crackling rad winds moaned through the stalagmites growing upwards from pools of chalky water.

Hundreds of corpses were impaled on these stalagmites, their ribs peeled back with spears of rock rising up through their chests and their broken limbs hanging limp.

The moisture dripping from above ran down the slack faces of the dead like milky tears, slowly encasing them in a skein of pearlescent minerals and preserving them in the moment of their greatest agony.

This was a trophy cavern of the Justaerin, and typical of their cruelty.

Nergüi paused beside the impaled body of a man whose body was covered in swirling scars and hooded eye tattoos that marked him as one of the Esharkol, a clan that dwelled just below the surface and plundered the ancient ruins. His tattoos curled around cancerous lesions caused by repeated exposure to hard radiation.

The liquid flowing from his bent body was streaked with crimson threads.

A fresh kill, only recently impaled upon the rock.

His eyes flicked open.

‘Boy…’ he gasped, his eyes pleading.

Nergüi backed away from the man. Dying men were apt to drag you down with them.

‘Boy,’ repeated the man, holding out his hand. ‘Your… knife. Give… me.’

‘No,’ said Nergüi.

‘Do it!’ hissed the man. ‘Can’t die… without… weapon in… hand.’

The Esharkol had only moments left to him. Nergüi should move on, leave before the dying man’s cries attracted the attention of the Justaerin.

Nergüi nodded slowly and took out Nyla’s dagger.

‘Yes,’ said the man, blood bubbling from his lips. ‘Give… it…’

Nergüi placed the edge of the knife against the man’s throat and sliced it open.

The man’s eyes widened in shock and anger. His hand clawed the air, and the last spasms of his heart pumped a weak stream of blood over Nergüi’s hand as he pulled the blade clear.

The Esharkol bled out. His limbs convulsed as the light faded from his eyes.

Nergüi lifted his arm. The dagger and his hand were wet with bright blood.

The blade caught the reflected light of the moon, turning it red.

This didn’t make him blooded.

He hadn’t killed this man in battle, but it was a start.

He found a route to the surface just beyond the Justaerin trophy cave, following a crooked stair that spiralled around a straight-cut shaft filled with iron debris and smashed scaffolding. Nergüi felt his skin prickling as he climbed higher, the temperature rising with every step upwards.

The air tasted of metal and dust, of things best forgotten and abandoned.

Nergüi came to a ladder that climbed a rough-hewn shaft towards a steel plate, crudely welded over a buckled frame. Blue light from the surface seeped in around its broken edges.

He climbed the ladder, peering up through the gap in the plate. Bracing his shoulders against it, he pushed up. He felt it give, but not enough. Too heavy to move completely, but enough of a gap remained for him to squeeze through.

Nergüi stared at the gap. Particulate matter floated in the angled shaft of blue light.

Behind him was darkness and misery, a life of resentment and endless war.

Ahead lay… what?

He didn’t know. What was he expecting, that a new life would open up before him, that everything he thought he knew of the surface was wrong and that he’d find a purpose beyond the utterdark?

No, he wasn’t so foolish as to believe in miracles.

At best, this trip to the surface was a diversion, a temporary escape. A memory to cling to in the days, months and years to come in the unending war of the grim darkness below.

Nergüi smiled. That was more than enough.

He pushed up through the steel plate, and hauled himself onto the surface of Cthonia.

The ladder emerged into a wide hangar of hard permacrete floors and steel sheeting.

Broken walls of prefabricated blocks surrounded him on three sides, vitrified to a glasslike finish by some terrible heat. Dust blew in from the open side, lying in undulant drifts and twisting in wind-blown spirals.

Abandoned ore transporters sat in forlorn ranks, their hoppers empty and their wheels, the smallest of which were taller than a full-grown man, rotted and flat. The high roof of the hangar was all but gone, and the cold blue orb of Cthonia’s star glared down at him from the oil-dark sky. Nergüi shielded his eyes from its piercing light, feeling the heavy radiation already beginning to darken his pallid complexion.

Through the missing wall, Nergüi saw a wasteland like nothing he had ever seen.

Smashed and toppled structures of dark stone and steel surrounded him, remnants of a previous civilisation long gone to dust. Towering mining engines on tracked wheels lay broken open on their sides with ash piled in their windward sides. Looming over this vista of ruin were sagging towers with enormous rotary cable drums at their summits, buckled and leaning as if from ferocious impacts.

Nergüi felt an aching sadness at the sight of what remained of his world.

Emerging from the hangar, the vista of devastation only widened.

Yet this was not the devastation of war, but the wreckage of a place abandoned, like a bond-wife cast aside when bad water and the gradual build-up of toxins eventually turned her womb into a creator of hideous monsters.

The western horizon shimmered with veils of blue, green and gold light that rippled as though the sky were on fire. It made the atmosphere bitter in his lungs: hard, granular and caustic.

He could feel its oily residue coating the inside of his throat with every breath.

The initial pain he’d felt at the surface’s brightness slowly faded as Nergüi walked slowly down the sloped esplanade before the vehicle hangar. Parallel rails, half-buried in grey dust, split and diverged before him. Too large for mining carts, these were wider than two men lying head to toe.

Nergüi tried and failed to imagine the scale of the machine that could travel on such rails.

He moved through the ruins, trying to reconcile what he had been told of the surface with the sights before him now. Nothing within its environs was suited to his human scale, and Nergüi felt as though he had travelled to some distant world where creatures not bound by mortal laws had once ruled.

Everything on the surface – every structure and vehicle, every titanic machine and dormant apparatus – was built for men scaled to the size of gods.

Nergüi paused in his explorations as he heard something beyond the howl of the wind through the ruins. The sound was clearly artificial, rhythmic and persistent, like a machine heart beating on the air itself. Moving deeper into the ruins he saw the stark glow of actinic light.

Light meant people, and you didn’t walk into a rival tribe’s camp without a blood-host.

But what kind of blood-host could hope to face gods?

None, but perhaps a single individual might pass unnoticed…

He kept to the shadows, calling upon everything he had learned in the depths of Cthonia’s darkness.

Eventually, he halted in the shadow of a shattered structure lined with the scavenged shells of hollowed-out machines. He took position behind a ruined section of wall, peering through the corroded pipes of a giant turbine.

Below him was a shallow crater in which sat a squat starship shaped like a flattened cylinder with tall, rectangular drive nacelles at its rear. It stood on splayed legs, and a host of figures worked to remove something from a pit dug into the dusty ground before it. Powerful stab-lights on tripods lit the excavations, but Nergüi couldn’t tell what it was they were removing.

Most of the figures were grey-skinned men with metal arms or legs grafted to their bodies, running the gamut from individuals with single augmetic limbs to those that were more like earth-moving engines with human scraps alloyed to their machine hearts.

Towering bipedal walkers stalked the perimeter on oddly jointed legs, plated in curved steel and bearing enormous cannons fitted with colossal ammo hoppers. They bore riders with visors moulded into the form of androgyne gods, equipped with pulsing red eyes that scanned the ruins.

Nergüi knew that to attract their notice would be to die.

Overseers in crimson robes stitched with golden cogs directed the work parties, and Nergüi had never seen their like before: chimerics of machine and man that communicated in grating barks, like hand-cranked alarm sirens that warned a tribe of intruders. Flitting, obsidian skulls darted overhead, screeching at one another in whistling pops and clicks.

‘What are you?’ he whispered.

He turned his attention to the object they were excavating. He still couldn’t see exactly what it was, something around three metres long and cylindrical, tapered at one end. Dust from the excavators obscured the object, as did the robed overseers, but a glimpse of carved thunderbolts on its golden skin triggered a sudden jolt of recall he could not understand.

Nergüi started to rise from his cover behind the dead turbine, but caught himself just in time.

Pebbles skittered down the slope, and he ducked back as one of the bipedal strider machines paused in its circuit of the perimeter. Its long-barrelled cannon swung around and targeting beams pulsed into his hiding place.

He kept utterly still, hardly daring to breathe.

The beams widened and narrowed their focus as they swept through the space, rotating and filling it with light. Nergüi had no real idea what the light was doing, but the instinct of the hunted kept him immobile.

At last the beams ceased their probing and Nergüi released his breath.

He risked a glance through the pipework down into the crater and was relieved to see the giant machine continue in its marching stride.

In the time he had kept still, the robed overseers had removed the golden object from the ground and were even now escorting it aboard their ship. It was gone before he could see it again properly, but the reverence with which these people were treating it suggested it was a relic or object of great import.

Nergüi heard the crunch of stone the instant before the whining build-up of energy.

He spun on his heel in time to see a hooded figure in red robes with a long-rifle at its shoulder.

Its eyes were twin spots of pale blue light, and the heavy grained wood of its rifle was in stark contrast to the intricate machinery of the weapon’s firing mechanism.

Fear clamped hard on Nergüi’s heart and the breath caught in his throat.

He dived to the side as the air between them buckled with a discharge of energy.

The brick wall behind Nergüi exploded into dust and fragments. Red-hot pieces of pipework spun away like blades. Nergüi rolled and ran for cover as the rifleman fired again. The same blue of his eyes beamed from an underslung gemlight.

Nergüi slid into cover behind a detached fan, each of its blades as wide as he was tall.

The robed figure pumped shot after shot in Nergüi’s wake, blasting bronzed chunks of fire-edged metal from the ancient fan. Portions of it fell away, clattering to the permacrete in a deafening rain of debris. Nergüi scooped up a handful of the dust, bolts and washers scattering on the floor.

Braying squawks of alarm sounded from the crater below.

Nergüi heard the swift snap-click of a magazine change, instantly followed by the building whine of the weapon’s firing mechanism.

He spun around the fan blade, Nyla’s bone-handled dagger held low in his right hand.

The shooter swung his rifle to bear and pulled the trigger.

The beam grazed Nergüi’s shoulder, burning a fiery line across his flesh.

He roared and hurled himself at the figure. The impact was like running into a support pillar, but the two of them fell to the ground in a thrashing, jabbing tangle of limbs.

The figure swung the butt of its rifle. It cracked painfully against Nergüi’s skull. He rolled with the blow and spat blood into his enemy’s glowing blue eyes. The light flickered and Nergüi used its momentary distraction to drive Nyla’s dagger up into the thing’s armpit.

It slid across overlapping bands of armour, but pierced the weaker flexseal.

He felt the tip dig into meat and sinew and pushed with all his strength.

A horrible machine scream issued from beneath the thing’s hood. Nergüi drove the blade in deeper, seeking vital organs as he churned the dagger’s grip like he was working a crank.

Something ruptured deep inside the figure, and a stinking wash of black blood gushed over Nergüi.

His foe shuddered and stopped moving, as if his life had simply switched off.

Nergüi rolled from the suddenly still body and dragged the blade from his enemy’s chest cavity.

The sound of his own breath bellowed in lungs that suddenly felt too full of air. His heart was pounding with a nightmarish double beat that sounded impossibly loud.

He scrambled to his feet, hearing the heavy thump of the striding machines’ iron footfalls.

He scooped up the fallen warrior’s rifle and ran, the stock and trigger still sticky with oily blood.

More of the strobing blue targeting beams painted the air, and this time he was powerless to avoid them. He heard the chiming of a brass bell and howling brays of triumph. Crackling bursts of the strange language of static chased him.

A warning? A command?

Nergüi knew he could not escape. Too much open ground lay between him and safety.

Resolved to his death, he stopped and turned to look back at his pursuers.

If he couldn’t escape, he would fight.

‘Because fighting and killing is what you do down in the utterdark,’ said Nergüi.

Two of the striding machines had him cold, their terrible weapons aimed right at him. One of the robed figures stood between the two machines. A host of serpentine cable-arms drifted at its back.

Nergüi lifted the stolen rifle to his wounded shoulder, where the scorched flesh was already healing. His blood thickened and the heat beneath his skin signalled that its preternatural ability to repair itself was already underway.

Another strange scar to add to his collection.

‘You fight so hard they have to kill you.’

He pulled the trigger and a searing green bolt spat from the weapon.

A discharge of ghost-light enveloped the robed figure, and the bolt dissipated before it reached him.

Nergüi squeezed the trigger again and again, each shot dead on target, each impact absorbed by the invisible energy field. He fired until the weapon coughed empty.

‘You fight until your gun runs dry,’ said Nergüi, slinging the enemy warrior’s rifle over his shoulder and pulling out Nyla’s dagger.

‘You fight until your knife dulls and snaps, until your fists are broken.’

The ammo hoppers on the back of the striders clattered as scores of shells were fed into the giant weapons. The blue targeting beams swept over him again, penetrating his flesh so that they might know his every weakness. All the better to kill him.

‘You only lay down when your heart stops beating,’ said Nergüi.

With his free hand, he pulled out the two mirror coins on the cord hung around his neck.

Khageddon had given them to him, said they’d come from the eyes of his adoptive father.

Nergüi lifted the looped cord over his head, holding them out for his killers to see.

‘After you kill me, place these upon my eyes,’ he said.

The twisting coins caught the light of the blue sun, the metal smooth and polished.

The robed figure crackled a command, and the tall striders lowered their weapons.

To Nergüi’s amazement, they slowly turned and walked away.

The figure beckoned to him.

Nergüi shook his head. The figure beckoned again.

Nergüi turned and ran.

And this time he didn’t look back.

Khageddon turned the rifle over in his hands, admiring the workmanship of the trigger mechanism, the toothed cog symbol on its cheek plate, and the perfectly machined balance of the weapon.

‘You killed the one who bore this?’

‘I did,’ replied Nergüi proudly.

He stood before his tribe, a man at last, holding himself tall for what felt like the first time in his life.

The light from the magma fissure illuminated Khageddon’s face and the faces of the tribal braves surrounding them. Karaamat, Oromegon and Barsine watched, incredulous, as Khageddon lifted the rifle to his shoulder and sighted along the barrel with a grunt. Oil-burning lamps hung from the cavern ceiling, rocking back and forth in response to some distant movement in the rock.

‘You killed one of the blue-eyed ghouls on the surface?’

‘Yes.’

‘How? How did you kill him?’ said Khageddon, running a finger through the black residue on the rifle’s stock.

‘I spied upon their excavations,’ said Nergüi. ‘But they heard me, and one of their sentries almost surprised me. But I charged him, knocked him down.’

Nergüi pulled out Nyla’s dagger, its blade still coated with black liquid.

‘We struggled and I got the blade in under his armour. Drove it in good and deep. Then he died.’

Khageddon licked his finger, running the black tip over his lips.

‘This blood is not a man’s blood,’ said the Overlord, dropping the rifle at his feet as though it were a poisonous rock-eel. ‘It is the vitae-fluid of a machine. All you have done is bring death down upon us.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Nergüi, feeling his earlier hope fading like the light in the impaled Esharkol’s eyes as he’d cut his throat. The rocking motion of the lamps overhead increased, and a low rumbling set Nergüi’s teeth on edge.

‘You brought that weapon to me, thinking I would blood you, that you had earned a kill-name?’

‘I have,’ insisted Nergüi. ‘I–’

Khageddon didn’t let him finish. He backhanded Nergüi across the face.

The impact drove him down onto one knee.

Once, that would have been enough to cow him, to keep him down on the ground in shame.

But the shedding of blood, whether in mercy or survival, had changed Nergüi.

It had touched something deep inside him, interacting with some hitherto unknown element like a reagent and igniting a newfound fire in his soul.

The roof of the cave shook, and veils of dust drifted downwards. A lamp fell from its hook, crashing to the floor in an explosion of glass and fire.

Murmurs of unease passed through the cave as a rumbling tremor rose from the fissure.

Red light bloomed in the deeps.

Nergüi wiped blood from his lip with the back of his hand.

He gripped the handle of Nyla’s blade tight and rose to his full height.

Once, Khageddon had seemed like the most powerful among them, a killer supreme. An invincible warrior who would lead the Reivers to greatness, who would one day break the chains of the wretched existence that bound them in the darkness of ignorance and bloodshed.

But Nergüi now saw him for what he truly was: just another petty and bloodthirsty tyrant unworthy of devotion.

Khageddon saw the threshold crossed within him and nodded slowly.

‘It is time,’ he said, looking up as the roof of the cavern shook once more. ‘Do it, no-name. Do it, and earn your kill-name in my blood.’

Nergüi stepped in close and rammed Nyla’s dagger up under Khageddon’s breastbone. It cut through the wet-meat resistance of muscle and organs, scraping against his ribs as it clove the man’s heart.

The ground shook as Nergüi twisted the blade.

A catastrophic amount of blood gushed from the wound.

More sprayed from Khageddon’s mouth as a wide crack split the cavern roof like tectonic plates shifting. Something colossal punched through the crack with a deafening howl of metal tearing rock.

A conical drill head screamed as it forced its bulk into the cavern.

The thing was scored and burned from its passage through the planet’s bedrock, its sides caked in ash and dust. But the toothed cog symbol on its emerging armoured flanks was unmistakable.

Khageddon had been right. He had brought death down upon them.

Warriors scattered as cascades of rubble and rock fell in a deadly rain of splintered stone.

Khageddon sank to his knees, the life pouring out of him with every second.

They went down together, embracing like a loving father and dutiful son.

The Overlord’s head fell forward onto Nergüi’s shoulders.

‘I… give you… a… name,’ he said through teeth gritted in agony.

‘My kill-name?’ said Nergüi.

Khageddon nodded and whispered in Nergüi’s ear. A word, a name.

No longer was he Nergüi, the no-name.

The word spoken, Khageddon’s face relaxed, as though he had passed on some terrible burden.

He smiled and looked up at the cavern roof with a strange, wistful expression. And with his last breath he said, ‘It took me a lifetime to learn how to die.’

Khageddon’s arms fell limp, and he toppled backwards, sliding down the slope towards the fissure.

A moment’s regret touched the boy as he watched the man who had shaped him more than almost any other disappear from sight, but the feeling vanished with the next beat of his heart.

He stood and looked upon the world with fresh eyes.

The cave was collapsing and his tribe were dying, but he felt curiously calm.

He knew who he was now.

That understanding blew life over a spark deep in the very heart of him.

A spark that had always been there, smouldering in the darkness and on the edge of extinction, but which now roared back to life with a vengeance.

Knowledge flooded him: visions of a hostile galaxy of a billion worlds and uncounted civilisations.

At its heart was the ancient birthrock of humanity, a war-weary world ruled by a golden lord who sat His lonely vigil atop a soaring tower set among snow-mantled peaks at the roof of the world.

The lord looked up from His contemplation and smiled.

+It is time.+

Three simple words, but they were the key to unlocking the sleeping power within him. It unfolded in waves of surging, raw emotions; consuming the no-name boy he had been and rewriting him.

Long-dormant genes awoke and began their miraculous work.

Synapses within his mind blazed as fresh connections were forged.

Bones and organs swelled with new purpose. His body surged, all flesh ripe with ambition, as a vast and unknowable anatomical shift took place within him. Veins and arteries burned phosphor-bright trails across his numinous flesh as his old self was shed like a serpent’s skin too small to contain its apotheosis.

It was agonising, this rebirth, every cell of his body ripped apart and wrought anew. It ferociously remade him without a care for his suffering, tearing him down and rebuilding his form as it was always meant to be. The pain was beyond what any living soul could endure and his mind began to collapse under the onslaught.

He threw back his head and howled as fire blazed from his outstretched arms.

And then it was over.

He fell to his knees as the sound and fury of the cavern’s destruction roared back to life around him.

Titanic boulders and pulverised slabs of splintered rock were crashing down in a murderous rain. Choking clouds of dust hid the carnage, but he heard the screams of the hurt and the dying. Rocks smacked his shoulder, drawing impossibly vivid blood and shattering the collarbone beneath.

Another slammed into his forehead. His vision swam red.

Blood streamed down his face. It didn’t matter.

He knew who he was now.

He breathed in ash and fire, tasted the metallic flavour of his own life. Crackling bolts of gunfire echoed strangely amid the thunderous sound of the cavern’s collapse.

Galvanic weaponry, he thought, unsurprised he knew the term.

More rocks and debris struck him and he fell onto his back.

A strange lethargy suffused him, as though his body – exhausted from the business of transformation – were shutting down.

He smiled as his vision greyed and the sounds of death and destruction grew remote.

None of it mattered now.

He knew who he was.

He heard iron-shod footsteps approaching and looked up to see a red-robed figure standing above him with a long-barrelled rifle that hummed with unearthly power.

A pair of blue eyes burned cold beneath a scarlet hood.

‘I have the boy.’

His hand shot out to enfold the hooded figure’s neck.

An alarmed blurt of machine language crackled from the bronze-grilled augmitter at its throat.

With only a little pressure, he crushed the blue-eyed warrior’s spine.

‘My name is… Horus!’