The Burden of Loyalty
Various
Backlist
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
Book 32 – DEATHFIRE
Book 33 – WAR WITHOUT END
Book 34 – PHAROS
Book 35 – EYE OF TERRA
Book 36 – THE PATH OF HEAVEN
Book 37 – THE SILENT WAR
Book 38 – ANGELS OF CALIBAN
Book 39 – PRAETORIAN OF DORN
Book 40 – CORAX
Book 41 – THE MASTER OF MANKIND
Book 42 – GARRO
Book 43 – SHATTERED LEGIONS
Book 44 – THE CRIMSON KING
Book 45 – TALLARN
Book 46 – RUINSTORM
Book 47 – OLD EARTH
More tales from the Horus Heresy...
CYBERNETICA
SONS OF THE FORGE
WOLF KING
PROMETHEAN SUN
AURELIAN
BROTHERHOOD OF THE STORM
THE CRIMSON FIST
PRINCE OF CROWS
DEATH AND DEFIANCE
TALLARN: EXECUTIONER
SCORCHED EARTH
BLADES OF THE TRAITOR
THE PURGE
THE HONOURED
THE UNBURDENED
RAVENLORD
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
Audio Dramas
THE DARK KING & THE LIGHTNING TOWER
RAVEN’S FLIGHT
GARRO: OATH OF MOMENT
GARRO: LEGION OF ONE
BUTCHER’S NAILS
GREY ANGEL
GARRO: BURDEN OF DUTY
GARRO: SWORD OF TRUTH
THE SIGILLITE
HONOUR TO THE DEAD
WOLF HUNT
HUNTER’S MOON
THIEF OF REVELATIONS
TEMPLAR
ECHOES OF RUIN
MASTER OF THE FIRST
THE LONG NIGHT
IRON CORPSES
RAPTOR
Download the full range of Horus Heresy audio dramas from blacklibrary.com
Also available
MACRAGGE’S HONOUR
A Horus Heresy graphic novel
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
The Horus Heresy
The Thirteenth Wolf – Gav Thorpe
Into Exile – Aaron Dembski-Bowden
Cybernetica – Rob Sanders
Analyse/Interpret
Formulate
Implement
Locate/Isolate
Execute
Reconfigure
End of Line
Ordo Sinister – John French
The Heart of the Pharos – L J Goulding
Wolf King – Chris Wraight
The Blood-well
I
II
III
IV
V
The Binary Succession – David Annandale
Perpetual – Dan Abnett
Afterword
About the Authors
An Extract from ‘Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
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.
The Thirteenth Wolf
Gav Thorpe
Aboard the Stormbird Clawrend, the Old Guard of the Thirteenth Great Company shared a poignant silence. The growl of plasma jets and wind from the thickening atmosphere shook the hull around them. Bulveye stared at each of his veterans in turn, and met their gazes with his own knowing look.
They were armoured in bulky war-plate of storm-grey, gilded and silvered, decked with trophies, medallions and honours. Necklaces of alien fangs and bones hung about their gorgets, and their arms were bound with iron torqs. Tatters of parchment – oaths of moment and honours from the Allfather Himself – marked them as heroes of a hundred wars.
Each had been a grown man when the Imperium had rediscovered Fenris. Too old, they said. Too old to benefit from Great Russ’ gene-seed. Too old for the transformations.
‘Too tough to die, too stubborn to give up, eh?’ Bulveye grinned toothily. ‘We proved them wrong...’
Halvdan, his single eye shadowed in the light of the troop compartment, asked a question of the Old Wolf. ‘Will we offer terms to Magnus?’
Bulveye shook his head.
‘I asked that same question of the Wolf King himself. There is no chance of reconciliation. The sorceries of the Thousand Sons must be extinguished.’
Ha
lvdan offered no argument. Ranulf nodded sombrely.
‘We are the Vlka Fenryka, brothers,’ Bulveye continued. ‘The Space Wolves, the Rout. We have come as the Allfather’s executioners, with a single purpose – to destroy a world, to annihilate its people and render its civilisation down to ashes. Prospero, home to the Thousand Sons, Legion of Magnus the Red, the Crimson King. Traitorous lord of a corrupt world. We are righteousness, and that cannot be held at bay.’
Jurgen let out a short laugh. ‘Yet the power of Magnus protects his capital. Mass drivers and magma bombs have burned all the rest of Prospero, but Tizca still stands.’
The others cursed their foes’ sorcerous ways, but Bulveye silenced them with a stern glare. ‘A Legion destroying another is a humbling matter,’ he reminded them. ‘We should take no joy from the destruction of our brothers. Be brutal and efficient, the Wolf King said, but do not glory in the fall of Magnus and his sons.’ He paused. A broad, toothy grin split his features. ‘But show no mercy either! The other Great Companies are already on the ground. We will have some catching up to do...’
The hull started to rattle with the detonation of anti-aircraft fire, and the rush of wind grew louder and louder as the gunship descended.
With a change of inertia that would have broken the spines of lesser men, the Stormbird fired its landing thrusters, forcing the Old Guard into their harnesses. Bulveye stroked the sealskin-bound haft of his single-bladed power axe, Eldingverfall – the storm’s strike.
They landed, the gear hydraulics shrieking below them and the hull shuddering from the impact. Bulveye stood, hitting the activator for the assault ramp.
The brightness and all-consuming roar of battle swept into the gunship. Bulveye lifted Eldingverfall, catching the ruddy light on its rune-etched blade, and raised his voice over the din. ‘Did you not think we would get our hands bloody today?’
The fire of countless explosions reflected from the crystal pyramids of the city, the skies lit with pulses of red and blue and orange from incendiary shells, las and plasma.
Regiments of scarlet-clad Prosperine Spireguard flowed down the roads and broad steps towards the Space Wolves. The defenders’ tanks and walkers followed, laying down a curtain of fire to meet the grey-armoured mass of legionaries surging through the capital.
Crystal shards and molten metal rained as Bulveye of the Thirteenth led his company through the maze of streets and cloisters. The towering structures of the Syrianus Precincts were one of several anchors for the enemy’s defence of the inner city, and Russ had tasked Bulveye and his warriors with overpowering the Thousands Sons’ flank.
Now the precincts burned beneath the fury of the Rout.
Las-fire from the Spireguard sparked azure beams along colonnaded roads and scoured down from balconies and windows, and a tempest of bolt-rounds snarled and cracked in reply. Dreadnoughts covered the advance of the Thirteenth, their autocannons and heavy bolters raking swathes of destruction through the defenders of Tizca. Bolstered by their presence, Bulveye and his warriors pushed further into the city of the Thousand Sons.
‘Give no thought to retreat,’ the Old Wolf snarled. ‘We leave this place with our names recited in the rolls of victory, or in the laments of the lost. The Allfather has called on us, his wolf pack, again, and we will see His enemies torn apart to the last remnant. Give no quarter, for we can expect none in return.’
It was not only physical forces and dimensions that broke the landscape. The pyramids and obelisks of Tizca gleamed with another power that distorted the heavens like a coruscating heat haze. Crimson lightning lashed down from the highest summits of glass and white metal, leaving shattered ceramite and fused flesh where they struck.
Purple fire rained from tortured storm clouds that swirled about the pyramids, each burning droplet hissing as it smouldered through armour and seared into flesh. Plasma blasts and cannon fire screeched harmlessly from glimmering shields of unnatural power.
Bulveye felt the psychic field prickling his skin even though clad head-to-foot in power armour, its ceramite plates no barrier to the otherworldly energies manipulated by the deviant Thousand Sons. Waves of sorcery, like a hot wind inside his flesh, were emanating from the cluster of domes and ziggurats towards which the Thirteenth Company advanced.
Another psychic storm swept across Bulveye’s warriors, lacerating battleplate with its touch, churning exposed flesh down to the bone.
Not one shout of pain or protest rose from the throats of the Space Wolves as they fell. Instead they roared their defiance of the Thousand Sons’ arcane powers and spat oaths of vengeance upon the traitors of Prospero.
The Old Wolf pointed his axe at the tallest pyramid of the precincts, the temple-library’s glassy sides cracked and broken by artillery and tank shells that had penetrated the psychic force fields by weight of fire alone. Dark smoke issued from the many rents upon its reflective surface. Through the fume he could see a flickering corona as uncanny energies leaked from the pinnacle.
‘I’ll raise a feast of honour to the wolf-brother that slays the sorcerer within,’ he promised.
It was Ranulf that answered first, over the vox. ‘Ahh, my name shall be toasted that night!’
This was met by a chorus of good-natured jeers from the others. Jurgen in particular laughed loud and long.
‘And the Allfather Himself would come to pay His respects, no doubt!’ he jested. ‘But I’ll wager it is our own cyclops that strikes the final blow. As Russ will fell the one-eyed Crimson King, so Halvdan Bale-eye will chop down this upstart of a sorcerer. One eye for one eye. It is only fair.’
But Halvdan said nothing, perhaps expecting a punch-line jibe that did not come. The vox fell quiet, leaving only the roar of guns and pounding of armoured feet.
They were ancient fighters – hearthlords of Russ from before the coming of the Imperium, bound by a camaraderie longer than any normal lifetime. They were the heart of the Thirteenth Great Company, as well as the tip of its blade.
As they advanced, they passed other groups of VI Legion warriors. Bulveye recognised the quick-eyed Asmund amongst them, surveying the path ahead.
‘Beware the sorceries of Magnus’ brood,’ Asmund urged him. The words might have seemed redundant, but he continued with a more precise warning. ‘This whole city is steeped in the power of the wyrd, Old Wolf. Illusion is a weapon as powerful as any bolt or blast.’
‘So, we can trust nothing we see or hear, Rune Priest?’
‘You can trust my words, and the strength of Russ!’
The Space Wolves fired on the move, leaving the streets carpeted with hundreds of red-coated corpses as they pushed hard into the outer reaches of the precincts. Stormbirds and Thunderhawks scoured the broad avenues and plaza with battlecannon and lascannon fire. Bulveye and his company advanced past smouldering wrecks of fighting vehicles and armoured walkers.
Though progress was swift, the lord of the Thirteenth Company knew better than to underestimate the task ahead. ‘Stay alert,’ he urged them. ‘Magnus’ warriors have yet to show themselves. Know that when their fury comes it will be fierce, and we must ride the storm together. Listen to my command. Fight as one.’
‘There is not a son of Prospero yet born to match the Rout,’ Halvdan’s reply growled across the vox-link, ‘even if there are any brave enough left amongst them to dare face us.’
‘Not if they were the Ten Thousand Sons would they casually confront the Bale-eye. Not if they have the wisdom they claim so proudly.’
Jurgen was without mirth for a change. ‘The ravens feed on those that fall to the guns of cowards just the same.’
Hard fighting delivered the Old Guard of the Thirteenth onto the steps of the inner sanctum, the last two hundred metres fought through a bloody melee. Like phalangites of ancient Terran history, Spireguard with melta-pikes formed lines sixteen deep across the streets leading to the library-templ
e, the tips of their weapons glowing like heated brands.
Where they struck the plate of the charging Space Wolves, the long spears erupted with intense blasts of energy, piercing armour and snapping thickened bone.
The Rune Priest Asmund called out to Bulveye once more. ‘These foes are real enough, Old Wolf, but the temple-pyramid burns with malefic power. The enemy that lies within is strong in the ways of the Broken Path. He shields himself and his followers from my gaze with a curtain of beguiling gold.’
The sons of Russ hacked at their foes. Bulveye stepped into the breach of the phalanx, his plasma pistol annihilating the body of a Prosperine defender.
‘Press on! The skald’s scorn on the hindmost!’
The press of bodies was thick, but such was the strength and bulk of the Space Marines that even the backswing of a weapon would crush a man’s skull, and they trampled over their close-packed foes like a stampede of wild beasts. Though some fell to the melta-pikes, such gaps were quickly filled with more eager warriors, cutting down all in reach so that not a foe was left to strike at them from behind.
Ranulf was the first to break through and ascend the steps, others following swiftly towards the main doors of the pyramid. The great gate was flanked with tall statues of Magnus: cyclopean guards with arms crossed over their chests, a rod in one hand and a curved khopesh blade in the other.
‘Still they do not show themselves!’ Ranulf bellowed in frustration.
The ground started to shake, vibrating as if to the footstep of some impossibly vast beast. Cracks ran down the steps, parting the stone to swallow legionaries and Spireguard alike, hellfire glowing from the depths as though they were fractures into the abyss itself.
The entrance to the pyramid yawned wide, its two great doors swung outwards with a crack like thunder and a flare of white light. From the unnatural brightness emerged a column of Space Marines armoured in plate of dark red, edged with gold and silver.
Bolter fire raked down the steps, the rapid crack-and-boom of propellant and detonations in perfect time to the step of the Thousand Sons legionaries. The fusillade struck attacker and Spireguard without favour, pranging from the armour of the former, tearing apart the latter. So precise and ruthless was the counter-attack that Bulveye had thought at first that automatons assailed his warriors. He saw also in that moment that to pause in the slightest would be disaster. If the Thousand Sons were to sweep the Space Wolves from the threshold of their citadel, they might well drive them out of the precincts entirely.
