Shattered Legions Read online

  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

  More tales from the Horus Heresy...

  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

  CENSURE

  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

  Meduson – Dan Abnett

  Unforged – Guy Haley

  Immortal Duty – Nick Kyme

  Grey Talon – Chris Wraight

  The Keys of Hel – John French

  Deeds Endure – Gav Thorpe

  The Noose – David Annandale

  Unspoken – Guy Haley

  The Seventh Serpent – Graham McNeill

  Dramatis Personae

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Hand Elect – Chris Wraight

  The Either – Graham McNeill

  I

  II

  III

  Afterword

  About the Authors

  An Extract from ‘Leman Russ: The Great Wolf’

  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.

  Meduson

  Dan Abnett

  There were no surgical lasers available.

  A clustered missile strike over Isstvan V had blown out the Ionside’s flank from the lateral exchangers aft, voiding eight deployment bays and the port-side apothecarion chambers. The smaller medicae annex on the ship’s starboard side was overwhelmed with life-critical cases. Dying legionaries on stretcher boards were lined up along the hallway.

  Shadrak had only lost a hand. He reported instead to a makeshift triage station set up in the forward hold. Most of the staff there were frightened serfs drummed up from the ship’s crew. Gorgonson of the Lokopt Clan was the only Apothecary present, the only one that could be spared from the chaos of the medicae annex. He looked at the hand.

  ‘Excise,’ he instructed the human attendant waiting nearby. ‘Clean down to the forearm bones. Leave some tissue for conjunction and graft. I’ll be back to fit the augmetic.’

  Gorgonson didn’t say anything to Shadrak. There was nothing to say.

  No. There was a great deal to say – just no words with which to say it.

  He treated Shadrak like a piece of broken machinery presented for repair, not as a brother, an old friend or a fellow son of Terra. He didn’t even make eye contact. He just moved on to the next case, a battle-brother whose helm had been fused to his cheek by a melta burst.

  The human was a young ensign, freckle
-faced and red-headed. His anxiety made him seem like a small boy compared to Shadrak’s bulk. ‘Seat yourself, lord,’ he stammered, gesturing to a commandeered suit-room recliner that had a metal service trolley positioned beside it.

  Shadrak didn’t much care for the term ‘lord’. He was a captain, and that word alone was more than sufficient. But he was too tired to correct the serf, too empty. He felt like the tombs of Albia that he had visited as a child: vast and enduring, but long since robbed of the precious things they had once contained.

  Using his good hand, he took off his helm and placed it on the deck. Then he unstrapped his weapon belt, so that the harnessed gladius and bolt pistol would not encumber him when he sat. The belt had loops for reload clips. They were empty.

  The recliner creaked under his armoured weight. He set his boots on the foot rest, leaned back and placed his ruined left arm on the trolley. It would have been palm up, if he had still had a palm.

  The attendant stared at the wound. The hand was missing most of the fingers. It was a bloody mitten of blackened meat, with broken knucklebones protruding like twigs. The wrist was misaligned. The composite ceramite sleeve of Shadrak’s iron-black armour was mangled at the cuff, the torn ends stabbing into his flesh.

  ‘Is there pain?’

  Truth be told, Shadrak hadn’t been aware of any pain – not physical pain, anyway. The other pain was too immense, too entire.

  Surprised, he answered, ‘No.’

  ‘I have no anaesthetic,’ the man added reluctantly. ‘I have some numbing agents, but resources are so–’

  ‘Just do it,’ said Shadrak. His body had autonomically shut down a great number of his neural receptors at the moment of injury. His left hand didn’t feel much of anything anymore. It was just a dead weight, like a piece of kit he couldn’t unbuckle and remove.

  ‘There are no surgical lasers either,’ the serf apologised. Shadrak saw he was wiping a manual bone-saw with a sterile swab. The man’s hands were shaking.

  Under other circumstances, in other wars, Shadrak would have been amused by the sheer pathos of the situation. But his capacity for amusement was as empty as the tombs of Albia too.

  He sighed.

  ‘You’ll never get through the vambrace with that,’ he said. The man looked as though he was about to panic. ‘Do you have medical training?’

  ‘I am a junior gunnery officer, lord,’ the man replied. ‘But I have my corpsman certificate.’

  Again, the ‘lord’…

  Shadrak reached over with his right hand, unclasped the elbow guard and let it fall to the deck. Then he unfastened the clamps in the crook of his elbow and mid-forearm, and tugged the composite plasteel-and-ceramite sleeve off. Parts of the gauntlet were still attached, flapping loose. The buckled wrist seal was impacted into his flesh, and it took a little more effort to wrench it clear. Fluid and flecks of meat spattered the deck.

  He stripped away the undersleeve, tearing the fabric. His exposed skin looked as pale as bone, in stark contrast to the mauled mess of his hand.

  ‘How did this happen?’ the man asked, eyes wide at the fully exposed damage.

  ‘Horus happened,’ said Shadrak.

  He rested his arm back on the trolley. The man approached, gingerly, puffing counterseptic onto the wound from a flask, his hands still shaking. He took a grip on the bone saw, and consulted an anatomical diagram he had called up on the display of his data-slate. Shadrak knew that the man was dying to ask what he had meant, but didn’t dare.

  He rested the saw’s serrated edge against Shadrak’s flesh just below his torn wrist. The skin was covered in spots of fast-clotted blood. The serf swabbed them away, and then made the first draw.

  There was pain, of course, but it seemed minor and distant.

  Shadrak sat back and let it pass over him. He stared at the hold’s gloomy roof, into the darkness beyond the hanging lumens. He let his mind fill with memories – memories from before the pain. He tried to recollect something as far from it as possible. Before this minor discomfort, before the greater injury of the dropsite, before Medusa, before the Gorgon, before the Great Crusade…

  He thought of Terra, and the last years of the Unification Wars. He thought of his first days as a Storm Walker, serving under Lord Commander Amadeus DuCaine in the theatres of Afrik and the Panpacific. Back then, justly proud of their fresh, gene-herited might, none of them had known what the Storm Walkers would become, or what revision of structure and loyalty they would have to undergo. And even once they had known, they had embraced it wholeheartedly. It had not been a matter of reformation or repair, though fates knew that the X Legion were especially resilient when it came to repair.

  It had been a matter of ascendancy.

  It had been a blessing. To be called to your primarch’s side, to become one of his. Shadrak had cast off his Terran surname, a mortal vestige that had fallen into disuse anyway, and taken the name Meduson to demonstrate and affirm his allegiance to his new home world.

  He had become Shadrak Meduson of Clan Sorrgol, Captain of the Tenth Company. The Storm Walkers of Unification had become the Iron Hands. They had expected nothing but glory in their future. Even if calamity chanced to overtake the Iron Tenth on the field of war, it would be a glorious calamity in the Emperor’s service.

  None of them had ever anticipated this inglorious ruin. None of them could ever have imagined such a measure of raw treachery.

  None of them could ever have expected this scale of loss and pain.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the man said.

  Shadrak opened his eyes.

  Despite his clotting factors and vascular shunts, the top of the trolley was running with blood. It was dripping off the edges and making a rectangular, splatter-pattern halo on the deck. The flesh of his wrist was marked with several bloody hesitation wounds. When the young serf had finally found some confidence and purpose, he had opened a gash like a gasping mouth, but the bone was barely nicked.

  The man’s hands were shaking more than ever. ‘Your bones are very… very strong, lord.’

  Shadrak saw that he was sweating.

  ‘They were made that way,’ he replied, sitting up. ‘Give me that slate.’

  The serf handed him the data-slate, and Shadrak reviewed the anatomical graphic as dispassionately as he might check a mechanical diagram. He made a note of the bone formation, compared it with what remained of his wrist, took note of blood vessels and tendon assembly and paid heed to the recommended link points for structural and neural grafting.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he said, handing the slate back. ‘It’ll be quicker.’

  The man slowly offered him the bloody saw, but Shadrak had already leaned over the side of the recliner and drawn his gladius. He set the edge of the blade along the clumsy guide cut that the bone saw had scored, paused, and struck his ruined hand off with a single, swift blow. It bounced off the side of the trolley and landed in the pool of blood on the deck. The serf hesitated, as though he felt it would be polite to pick the severed hand up and return it to Shadrak. Then he remembered himself, dropped the saw, and hurried forward to attend with clamps and wadding.

  ‘If it’s going to hurt anyway,’ said Shadrak as the man worked, binding the stump tightly, ‘it’s better that it doesn’t linger too.’

  Good advice, he thought. Applies to so damned much.

  Gorgonson returned an hour later and inspected the wound.

  ‘Do this yourself?’

  ‘It seemed for the best,’ Shadrak replied.

  ‘You’re no surgeon,’ said Gorgonson.

  ‘Never claimed to be. But your man there was intent on whittling me down until I was nothing but a spinal column and a rictus.’

  Gorgonson frowned. ‘We’re doing the best we can, given the circumstances.’

  ‘Well, he made more of a mess of me in ten minutes than the damned So
ns of Horus could manage in a week.’

  Gorgonson glared at him. ‘Don’t even joke,’ he hissed. ‘Damn you, Shadrak. Don’t even say the words aloud.’

  ‘You don’t think I’m angry?’ asked Shadrak. ‘I’m beyond rage. I’m in another place entirely. White heat and boiling blood. I’m going to butcher and burn every one of the bastards. Give me my new hand so I can get on with it.’

  Gorgonson hesitated. They had known each other for twenty-four decades. Like Shadrak, Goran Gorgonson had been a Storm Walker, a son of Terra. They had fought through the Unification Wars side by side. At their ascendancy, Goran had elected to join Lokopt, the clan that most remembered and celebrated the Terran aspect of the founding. But he had changed his name to Gorgonson in honour of the primarch.

  ‘Anger’s not going to get us anywhere, earth-brother,’ Shadrak said quietly, ‘except deader than we are already. Anger’s a blindfold, a fool’s motivation. I reserve it only for killing blows. We need cool heads and clear minds. This is survival, repair, rebuilding. Terra only knows, we’re good at repair – we excel at it, so this should play to our strengths.’

  ‘They’re calling a council,’ said Gorgonson.

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘The clan-fathers.’

  ‘A Clan Council?’ Shadrak asked. ‘What in Terra’s name for? This isn’t a matter of bloodline and heritage.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘The clan-fathers are proposing to assume command? Collective command?’

  ‘I suppose so. In the absence of…’ Gorgonson paused. There were words that were going to be too hard to say, names that were going to be too hard to utter. ‘The clan-fathers take control, for now. Isn’t there comfort and assurance in that? They are veterans who understand–

  ‘A Clan Council is the last thing we need,’ said Shadrak. ‘Command by committee? Pointless. We need positive, singular leadership.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had aspirations of command,’ Gorgonson remarked.

  Shadrak thought about that for a moment. The notion came as a surprise.

  ‘I don’t,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never considered it. I just know we need something now. Someone. We’re dead without it. Just a shattered rabble.’

  Gorgonson sighed. ‘Any Apothecary, even the best of us, will tell you that you can graft on a new hand, but you can’t graft on a new head.’