James Swallow
The Horus Heresy. The Flight Of The Elsenstein
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The Primarchs
HORUS Warmaster and Commander of the Sons of Horus Legion
ROGAL DORN Primarch of the Imperial Fists
MORTARION Primarch of the Death Guard
The Death Guard
NATHANIEL GARRO Battle-Captain of the 7th Company
IGNATIUS GRULGOR Commander of the 2nd Company
CALAS TYPHON First Captain
ULLIS TEMETER Captain of the 4th Company
ANDUS HAKUR Veteran Sergeant, 7th Company
MERIC VOYEN Apothecary, 7th Company
TOLLEN SENDER 7th Company
PYR RAHL 7th Company
SOLUN DECIUS 7th Company
KALEB ARIN Housecarl to Captain Garro
Other Space Marines
SAUL TARVITZ First Captain of the Emperor's Children
IACTON QRUZE, 'THE HALF-HEARD' Captain, 3rd Company, Sons of Horus
SIGISMUND First Captain, Imperial Fists
Non-Astartes Imperials
MALOGHURST 'THE TWISTED' Equerry to the Warmaster
AMENDERA KENDEL Oblivion Knight, Storm Dagger Witchseeker Squad
MALCADOR The Sigillite, Regent of Terra
KYRIL SINDERMANN Primary iterator
MERSADIE OLITON Remembrancer, documentarist
EUPHRATI KEELER 'The New Saint'; remembrancer
BARYK CARYA Shipmaster of the frigate Eisenstein
RACEL VOUGHT Executive officer of the frigate Eisenstein
TIRIN MAAS Vox officer of the frigate Eisenstein
PART ONE. THE BLINDED STAR
'If the sole trait these Astartes share in common with we mere mortal masses is their bond of brotherhood, then one must dare to ask the question - if that were lost to them, what would they become?'
- attributed to the remembrancer Ignace Karkasy
"We are the voice and the clarion call; We are tyrant's ruin and rival's fall.'
- from the battle mantra of the Dusk Raiders
'As with men so it is with silk; it is difficult to change their colours once they have been set!
- attributed to the ancient Terran warlord Mo Zi
ONE
Assembly
A Fine Sword
Death Lord
IN THE VOID, the vessels gathered. Shifting gently in the silent darkness, the crenellated hulls and great ornate shapes appeared as a congregation of Gothic edifices, cathedral-wrought in their complexity, drifting as if torn from the surface of worlds and carved into warships. Great sculpted bows filigreed into arrow points turned, stately and lethal, to face into the dark on a uniform heading. Torches burned on some, in apparent defiance of the airless vacuum. Plasma fires trailed white-orange streams of turbulent gas from chimneys along the kilometres of gunmetal hulls. These beacons were lit only when conflict was in the moment. The flares of wasteful, daring heat they generated were signs to the enemy.
We bring the light of illumination to you.
The craft that rode at the head of the flotilla was cut from steel the shade of a stormy sky, with a prow sheathed in dark ocean green. It moved as a
slow dagger might in the hand of a patient killer, inescapable, inexorable. It bore little in the way of ornament. The ship's only decorations were martial in nature, etchings on the plough-blade bow in letters the height of a man, long lines of text that recalled an age of battles fought, worlds visited, opponents lain to wreckage. Her only adornments of any note were two-fold: a golden spread eagle with two heads across the face of the flying bridge and a great icon made of heavy nickel-iron ore, a single stone skull set inside a hollow steel ring in the shape of a star, at the very lip of the spiked blade, watchful and threatening.
More ships fell into line behind her, taking up a formation that mirrored the spear tip battle-patterns of the warriors that were her payload. In echo of the unbreakable resolve of those fighters, the warship proudly bore a name in High Gothic script across her iron hull: Endurance.
Behind her came more of her kind, ranging in class and size both larger and smaller: the Indomitable Will, Barbarus's Sting, Lord of Hyrus, Terminus Est, Undying, Spectre of Death and others.
This was the fleet that gathered beyond the umbra of the sun Iota Horologii, in order to bring the Great Crusade and the will of the Emperor of Man to one of the gargantuan cylinder worlds of the jorgall. Carried in their thousands aboard the ships that served their Legion, the instruments of that will were to be the Astartes of the XIV Legion, the Death Guard.
KALEB ARIN MOVED through the corridors of the Endurance in a swift dance of motion, holding his heavy cloth-wrapped burden to his chest. Years of indentured service had bred in him a way of walking
and behaving that rendered him virtually hidden in plain sight around the towering forms of the Astartes. He was adept at remaining beneath their notice. To this day, even with so many years of duty glittering in the dull rivets fixed to his collarbone, Kaleb had not lost the keen awe at being among them that had filled him from the moment he had bent his knee to the XIV Legion. The lines on his pale face and the grey-white of his hair showed his age, but still he carried himself with the vitality of a man much younger. The strength of his conviction - and of other, more privately held ones - had carried him on in willing, unflinching servitude.
There were few men in the galaxy, he reflected, who could be as content as he was. The truth that never left him was as clear to him now as it had been decades ago, when he had stood beneath a weeping sky of toxic storm clouds and accepted his own limitations, his own failures. Those who continued to strive for what they could never reach, those who punished themselves for falling short of the dizzy heights they would never reach, they were the souls who had no peace in their lives. Kaleb was not like them. Kaleb understood his place in the scheme of things. He knew where he was supposed to be and what it was he was supposed to be doing. His place was here, now, not to question, not to strive, only to do.
Still, he felt pride at that. What men, he wondered, could hope to walk where he walked, among demigods cut from the flesh of the Emperor Himself? The housecarl never ceased to marvel at them. He kept to the edges of the corridors, skirting the broad warriors as they went about their preparations for the engagement.
The Astartes were statues come to life, great myths in stone that had stepped off their plinths to stride about him. They walked in their marble-coloured armour with green trim and gold flashing, some in the newer, smoother models of the wargear, others in the older iterations that were adorned with spiked studs and heavy-browed helms. These were impossible men, the living hands of the Imperium going to their deeds with shock and awe trailing around them like a cloak. They would never understand the manner in which mortal men looked upon them.
In his indenture, Kaleb knew that some among the Legion considered him with disrespect, as an irritant at best, worth no more than a drooling servitor at worst. This he accepted as his lot, with the same stoic character and dogged acceptance that was the way of the Death Guard. He would never fool himself into thinking that he was one of them - that chance had been offered to Kaleb and he had fallen short in the face of it - but he knew in his heart that he lived by the same code they did, and that his meagre, human frame would die for those ideals if it would serve the Imperium. Kaleb Arin, failed aspirant, housecarl and captain's equerry, was as satisfied with his life as any man could hope to be.