False Gods

The Warmaster was dead.

A sick dread settled on Loken and his head sank to his chest.

Then he heard the sound of footsteps, and looked up to see the gleam of white and gold plate emerge from the darkness.

Horus strode from the Delphos with his cloak of royal purple billowing behind him and his golden sword held high above him.

The eye in the centre of his breastplate blazed a fiery red and the laurels at his forehead framed features that were beautiful and terrible in their magnificence.

The Warmaster stood before them, unbowed and more vital than ever, the sheer physicality of his pres­ence robbing every one of them of speech.

Horus smiled and said, 'You are a sight for sore eyes, my sons,’

Torgaddon punched the air in elation and shouted, 'Lupercal!'

He laughed and ran towards the Warmaster, breaking the spell that had fallen on the rest of them.

The Mournival rushed to this reunion with their lord and master, joyous cries of'Lupercal!' erupting from the throat of every Astartes warrior as word spread back through the files and into the crowd surrounding the temple.

The pilgrims around the Delphos took up the chant and ten thousand throats were soon crying the Warmas-ter's name.

'Lupercal! Lupercal! Lupercal!'

The walls of the crater shook to deafening cheers that went on long into the night.

PART FOUR

Crusade's end

EIGHTEEN

Brothers

Assassination

This turbulent poet

Silver trails of molten metal had solidified on the breastplate and Mersadie Oliton had learned enough in her time with the Expedition fleet to know that it would require the aid of Legion artificers to repair it properly. Loken sat before her in the training halls, while other officers of the Sons of Horus were scattered throughout it, repairing armour and cleaning bolters or chainswords. Loken was melancholic, and she was quick to notice his sombre mood.

'Is the war not going well?' she asked as he removed the firing chamber from his bolter and pulled a cleaning rag through it. He looked up and she was struck by how much he had aged in the last ten months, thinking that she would need to revise her chapter on the immortality of the Astartes.

Since opening hostilities against the Auretian Tech­nocracy, the Astartes had seen some of the hardest fighting since the Great Crusade had begun, and it was beginning to tell on many of them. There had been few

opportunities to spend time with Loken during the war, and it was only now that she truly appreciated how much he had changed.

'It's not that,’ said Loken. The Brotherhood is virtually destroyed and the warriors of Angron will soon storm the Iron Citadel. The war will be over within the week,’

Then why so gloomy?'

Loken glanced around to see who else was in the train­ing halls and leaned in close to her.

'Because this is a war we should not be fighting,’

Upon Horus's recovery on Davin, the fleet of the 63rd Expedition had paused just long enough to recover its per­sonnel from the planet's surface and install a new Imperial commander from the ranks of the Army. Like Rakris before him, the new Lord Governor Elect, Tomaz Vesalias, had begged not to be left behind, but with Davin once again compliant, Imperial rule had to be maintained.

Before the fighting on Davin, the Warmaster's fleet had been en route to Sardis and a rendezvous with the 203rd Fleet. The plan was to undertake a campaign of compli­ance in the Caiades Cluster, but instead of keeping that rendezvous, the Warmaster had sent his compliments and ordered the 203rd's Master of Ships to muster with the 63rd Expedition in a binary cluster designated Drakonis Three Eleven.

The Warmaster told no one why he chose this locale, and none of the stellar cartographers could find reports from any previous expedition as to why the place might be of interest.

Sixteen weeks of warp travel had seen them translate into a system alive with electronic chatter. Two planets and their shared moon in the second system were dis­covered to be inhabited, glinting communications satellites ringing each one, and interplanetary craft flit­ting between them.

More thrilling still, communications with orbital monitors revealed this civilisation to be human, another lost branch of the old race – isolated these past centuries. The arrival of the Crusade fleet had been greeted with understandable surprise, and then joy as the planet's inhabitants realised that their lonely existence was finally at an end.

Formal, face-to-face contact was not established for three days, in which time the 203rd Expedition under the command of Angron of the XII Legion, the World Eaters, translated in-system.

The first shots were fired six hours later.

The ninth month of the war.

Bolter shells stitched a path towards Loken from the blazing muzzle of the bunker's gun. He ducked behind a shell-pocked cement column, feeling the impacts hammering through it and knowing that he didn't have much time until the gunfire chewed its way through.

'Garvi!' shouted Torgaddon, rolling from behind cover and shouldering his bolter. 'Go left, I've got you!'

Loken nodded and dived from behind the cover as Torgaddon opened up, his Astartes strength keeping the barrel level despite the bolter's fearsome recoil. Shells exploded in grey puffs of rockcrete at the bunker's firing slit and Loken heard screams of pain from within. Locasta moved up behind him and he heard the whoosh of flame units as warriors poured fire into the bunker.

More screams and the stink of flesh burned by chemi­cal flame filled the air.

'Everyone back!' shouted Loken, getting to his feet and knowing what would come next.

Sure enough, the bunker mushroomed upwards with a thudding boom, its internal magazine cooking off as its internal sensors registered that its occupants were dead.

Heavy gunfire ripped through their position, a col­lapsed structure at the edge of the central precinct of the planet's towering city of steel and glass. Loken had mar­velled at the city's elegance, and Peeter Egon Momus had declared it perfect when he had first seen the aerial scans. It didn't look perfect now.

Puffs of flickering detonations tore a line through the Astartes, and Loken dropped as the warrior with the flame unit disappeared in a column of fire. His armour kept him alive for a few seconds, but soon he was a burning statue, the armour joints fused, and Loken rolled onto his back to see a pair of speeding aircraft rolling around for another strafing run.

'Take those ships out!' yelled Loken as the craft, sleeker, more elegant Thunderhawk variants, turned their guns towards them once again.

The Astartes spread out as the under-slung gun pods erupted in fire, and a torrent shells tore through their position, ripping thick columns in two and sending up blinding clouds of grey dust. Two warriors ducked out from behind a fallen wall, one aiming a long missile tube in the rough direction of the