The planet was dead, and it had served a purpose in dying. The dozen other colony worlds of the Gyges system, each of them more valuable, more populous than this one, they would look through their mnemoniscopes and watch this ember cool and fade. Why choose to attack that world and no other? The question they first asked as the warships passed them by had now been answered: for the lesson of it.
Tobeld did not dwell on this, as he moved around the lee of the temporary pergolas set up beneath the wings of the tethered Stormbirds, hearing the mutter of conversation among the warriors around him amid the snap of guyropes and wind-pulled fabric. Messages were already coming in from the ships in orbit. The other worlds, the orbital platforms, the system defence fleet, all were surrendering. Twelve planets teeming with people, giving up their freedom without a single word of defiance. Lesson learned.
The taking of the Gyges system had been a swift and almost cursory thing. Doubtless, in decades to come, it would be less than a postscript in the annals of the war. No casualties of note had been taken by the warfleet, none that mattered to the architect of the conflict that this small venture was but a fragment of. Gyges was merely a stone in the path, a path that began in the Isstvan system and wound its way across the galaxy towards Terra. Gyges was a passing footstep, beneath which the blood of millions left no mark. By conventional battle logic, there was no reason for any of the invaders to even step on to the surface; yet still they had come, in this small party, for reasons that could only be guessed at.
Tobeld stifled a cough with his hand, pushing the thick robe of his hood to his face to muffle the sound. It came away wet and he tasted copper in his mouth. The radiation had killed him the moment he stepped out from the shuttle, him and the other serfs brought down from the flagship in order to serve the invaders. The serfs would all be dead before sunset. He knew he would share that fate, but it was a price worth paying. In the dimness of his dormitory capsule back on the warship, Tobeld had used a quarter of the elements of his weapons kit to fabricate a strong dosage of counter-radiation drugs; the rest he had turned to the building of the compound that nestled inside the finger-long glass vial strapped to the inside of his wrist. He had done his best to dispose of the remnants of the kit, but he was afraid some trace might still be discovered; and the counter-rads were working poorly. He had little time.
He passed behind the engine bells of a drop-ship and through the black haze he spied the largest of the tents, a low pavilion made of non-reflective cloth. For a second, the wind snapped at the entrance flap and showed him a glimpse of things inside. He saw what might have been firelight jumping and moving off slabs of polished ceramite armour, and wet shapes like animated falls of blood. Then the breeze passed on and the sight was lost to him. Still, the confusion of impressions made him shiver.
Tobeld hesitated. He would need to cross open ground to get from the Stormbird to the pavilion, and he could not afford to be challenged. He was entering the terminal stage of his mission now, after so long. There could be no mistakes. No one had come this close before. He could not risk failure.
Tobeld took a shaky, tainted breath. He had sacrificed a solar year of his life to this mission, breaking out from under a cover he had spent half a decade building as a minor Nobilite clan cook-functionary. He had willingly discarded that carefully-crafted disguise to embrace a new one, such was the gravity of his new mission; and through cautious steps, with doses of poisons both subtle and coarse to smooth his path, Tobeld had made his way into service aboard the battle cruiser Vengeful Spirit, the flagship of Horus Lupercal.
Two years had passed since the betrayal at Isstvan, the bloody backstabbing that opened the way to Horus’s insurrection against the Imperium and his father, the Emperor of Mankind. In that time, his steady progression across the galaxy had gathered momentum. As this day showed, every system that passed beneath the keel of Horus’s warships either swore fealty to him, or else they burned. Worlds and worlds, united in the aftermath of the Great Crusade, were now torn between loyalty to a distant Earth and an absent Emperor, or to a victorious Horus and his army of warlords. The glimpses Tobeld got from his lower-decks vantage point showed an armada of turncoat-kindred consolidating power degree by punishing degree. Horus closed his steel grip on sector after sector. One did not need to be a tactician to know that the Warmaster was marshalling his energies for the advance that had to come – an eventual thrust towards Terra herself, and to the gates of the Imperial Palace.
Horus could not be allowed to take that step.
At first it had seemed an unassailable objective. The Warmaster himself, a primarch, a demigod warrior, and Tobeld just a man. A killer of superlative skill and subtlety, indeed, but still a man. To strike directly at Horus aboard the Spirit would have been madness, an impossibility. Tobeld toiled aboard the flagship for almost five months before he even laid eyes upon the Warmaster – and the being he saw that day was one of such magnitude that it set him reeling, the question hard in his thoughts. How do I kill this one?
Conventional poisons were worthless ranged against the physiology of an Astartes; they could ingest the harshest of venoms as Tobeld might sip wine. But Tobeld was here precisely because poison was his weapon of choice. It could be swift; it could be patient, escaping detection, lying dormant. He was one of Clade Venenum’s finest tox-artisans; in his apprenticeship he had manufactured killing philtres from the most base of components, he had terminated dozens of targets and left no trace. And he slowly came to believe that he was capable of this, if fate would only grace him with a single opportunity.
The weapon lay in the vial. Tobeld had created a binary agent, a mixture of molecular accelerant gels suspending a live sample of gene-altered Baalite thirstwater – a virulent fluidic life form that could consume all moisture within living tissues in a matter of seconds. When Horus had announced he would be leading a landing party to the surface of Gyges Prime, Tobeld heard the tolling of fate in the words. His chance. His single chance.
There was rumour and supposition aboard the Vengeful Spirit, down on the lower decks where the human serfs and servitors toiled. Men spoke of strange things afoot on the levels where the Astartes walked, of changes, of apparitions and peculiarities in parts of the vessel. Tobeld heard whispers of the so-called lodges where these changes took place. He listened to stories of rites made on the surfaces of conquered worlds, things that sickened him as much with their nauseating similarity to crude idolatry as with their hints of inhumanity and horror. The men who spoke of these things often vanished soon after, leaving nothing but fear in their wakes.
He concentrated on the weapon, listening for the wind to drop. Horus was there, no more than a dozen steps away, inside the pavilion with his inner circle – Maloghurst, Abaddon and the rest of them – engaging in whatever ritual had brought them to this place. Close now, closer than ever before. Tobeld prepared himself, forcing away the pain in his throat, his joints. Entering the command tent, he would introduce the weapon to the jug of wine at Horus’s side, fill the cups of the Warmaster and his senior battle-brothers. One sip would be enough to infect them… and he hoped it would be enough to kill, although Tobeld held no doubt he would not live to see his mission succeed. His faith in his art would have to be enough.