To his lasting regret, Horus knew better.
Warmaster was not a title, it was what he was.
The flow of battle was music to him, a virtuoso performance that could be read and anticipated like the perfect arrangement of notes. Battle was a chaotic, unpredictable maelstrom of chance, a random imbroglio where death played no favours. Horus knew war, knew battle as intimately as a lover. Horus knew what would come next as clearly as if he had lived it before.
Now.
Parthaan’s rampage was ended as a coruscating beam of hyper-dense light struck the back of his armour. For an instant it played harmlessly over the blood-matted plate. Then the Justaerin’s armour buckled as though an invisible giant was crushing him in its fist. Plates ruptured as a rising whine of building power split the air over Parthaan’s screams of agony.
A thunderclap of discharge and Parthaan died as he imploded at the subatomic level, and every particle of his being turned inwards and crushed by its own mass. Shattered plates collapsed as though the man within them had simply vaporised and Horus smelled a stink-wind of misted blood and bone.
A beat as the Justaerin struggled to comprehend what had just happened.
‘Ultar!’ shouted Horus. ‘Rapier platform. Conversion beamer.’
The rotor cannon turned on the gun carriage. Ultar walked his shells into it and reduced it to scrap metal.
‘Now they’ll come,’ whispered Horus and swung Worldbreaker from his shoulder. He kept the weapon moving. Even for a being of his stature, it took time to build speed and power with so heavy a weapon.
A warrior with a transverse crest of ivory led the Ultramarines.
A centurion. Visor tags identified him as Proximo Tarchon and Horus assimilated his available service record instantaneously.
Ambitious, honourable, practical.
Gladius, of course. Energised combat-buckler on the opposite arm. Bolt pistol, expected.
Tarchon fired as he ran. The thirty Ultramarines at his back did likewise, maintaining their rate of fire even as they charged.
‘Impressive,’ said Horus. ‘You do my brother much honour.’
Two Justaerin nearest the charging Ultramarines went down, carefully bracketed by the warriors in cobalt-blue. With enough mass-reactives brought to bear, even Tactical Dreadnought armour could be penetrated. Return fire punched half a dozen Ultramarines from their feet. Armour cracked open, flesh detonated.
Horus didn’t give the XIII Legion a chance to fire again.
Without seeming to move, he was suddenly among them. Worldbreaker swung and three Ultramarines exploded as though siege mines had detonated within their chest cavities. A copious volume of blood wetted the air. The flanged mace swung back again, one-handed. Low on an upward arc. Another four warriors died. Their bodies slammed against the walls with bone shattering force, their outlines punched into the steelwork.
Tarchon came at him, gladius arcing towards his throat.
The haft of Worldbreaker deflected the blade. Tarchon kicked him in the midriff, firing his bolter one-handed into his chest. Explosions ripped across the Warmaster’s breastplate and the amber eye at its centre split down the middle.
Horus caught the bolter between the talons of his gauntlet. A twist of the wrist and the weapon snapped just behind the magazine. Horus stepped inside Tarchon’s guard and took hold of his gorget.
Tarchon stabbed with his gladius. Horus felt blood well from the cut. He lifted Tarchon from the deck as though he was a child and clubbed his fist into the centurion’s chest.
The impact drove him back through his men, felling them like corn before the scythe. Horus kept going, sometimes bludgeoning, sometimes disembowelling. Gore boiled on his talons, clotted on Worldbreaker. Dripped from the cracked amber eye upon his breast.
He pushed into the Ultramarines. Surrounded on all sides by transhuman warriors. Honourable men who, only a short few years ago, would have called him lord. They might have balked at his naked ambition, resented his appointment to Warmaster over their own primarch, but still they loved and respected him. And now he had to kill them. They stabbed and shot, undaunted in the face of the might of the demigod in their midst. Blades scored furrows in his armour, bolt shells exploded. Fire and fury surrounded the Warmaster.
Against so many sublime warriors, even a primarch could be brought down. Primarchs were functionally immortal, but they weren’t invulnerable. People often forgot the difference.
In a fight like this, the skill was to find the moments of stillness, the places between the blades and bullets. A chainblade sailed past his head. Horus removed its owner’s. Bolter shells ricocheted from his thigh plate. Horus punched his taloned fist through a warrior’s hearts and lungs.
Always in motion, talons and mace killing with every stroke.
Twenty-three seconds later, the transit was a charnel house. Hundreds dead and every drop of blood wrung to paint the walls.
Horus let out a cathartic breath.
He felt someone approach and reined in a violent reaction.
‘Falkus,’ said Horus. ‘Get me the centurion’s gladius.’
The blast door to the command bridge was bulging inwards. The first blow had hit it like a Titan’s fist. The second buckled the metal and tore its upper corners from the frame. Lord Admiral Brython Semper stood with his duelling sabre unsheathed and the captain’s twin-barrelled Boyer held loosely at his thigh.
The upper barrel was an ancient beam weapon – a volkite, some called it – the underslung portion a one-shot plasma jet. It was a Space Marine killer, but could it kill a primarch?
Would he get the chance to find out?
He’d be lucky to get even a single shot off with the Boyer.
Perhaps a hundred people stood with him; surveyor readers, aides, juniors, scriveners and battle-techs, deckhands. None were combat-trained worth a damn. Only a single squad of armsmen with shotcannons and the nine Thallaxii Ferrox had any hope of inflicting real damage.
Banks of acrid smoke filled the bridge, and the only light was from a few stuttering lumens. The hololith had failed, and hydraulic fluids drizzled from ruptured pipework. Nothing remained of the command network. The vox crackled with screams.
‘We’ll make them pay for this, admiral,’ said a crewman, Semper couldn’t see who.
He wanted to say something suitably heroic. A valedictory speech to inspire his crew and earn them an ending worthy of the Guardian of Aquinas. All that filled his thoughts were the last words Vitus Salicar had said to him.
We are killers, reapers of flesh. You must never forget that.
The blast door finally tore free of its mounting and fell into the bridge like a profane monolith toppled by iconoclasts. A towering figure was revealed, a giant of legend.
Haloed by flames of murder and dripping with blood.
A mantle of stiffened fur wreathed the war god’s shoulders. His armour was the colour of night and gleamed with the fire of dying empires.
Semper had expected a charge, bursts of gunfire.
The god threw something at his feet. Semper looked down.
An Ultramarines gladius, the blade coated in vivid crimson. Its handle was wrapped in red leather. The hemispherical pommel was ivory, inlaid with the wreath-enclosed company number.