The Flight of the Eisenstein (The Horus Heresy #4)

by James Swallow

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?’

The veteran had tapped the eagles with a finger. ‘These are inanimate brass and no more, just as we are all flesh and bone.’

Death Guard cultivated an image that other Legions were only too quick to accept: that they were brutal, ruthless and hard-hearted, but the reality had more shades to it than that. That these Astartes rarely made sport of their warfare was true, but they were not so bleak and stern as some would have believed. Compared to the stories Kaleb had heard of stoic and dispassionate Legions like the Ultramarines or the Imperial Fists, the Death Guard could almost be considered wilful and disorderly.

‘Secrecy is the enemy of truth. Truth is what the Emperor and his warriors stand for! If men must gather in shadows–’ He

‘Warriors must know that they are valued. Praise… praise from one’s peers must be given when the moment is right. Without it, even the most steadfast man will eventually feel unvalued.’ There was an edge of melancholy that flickered through the primarch’s voice so quickly that Garro decided he had imagined it.

Angron was thickset and heavy. The Death Lord’s pale aspect was at the far end of the spectrum from the Red Angel’s clenched fist of a face, eyes deep-set among an orchard of scars. Angron’s mere presence leaked the coiled potential for feral violence into the chamber.

Khârn’s name was synonymous with brutality in battle. There were rumours of slaughters Khârn had caused that even the most ruthless of the Death Guard found difficult to stomach.

On Barbarus, where Mortarion had come to rest after falling through the chaotic turmoil of a warp storm, the boy-primarch found a planet where the human colonists were ground beneath the heel of a clan of mutant warlords.

Now, as then, he looked to the distant star and wondered again if it were home. Could the Emperor, in his matchless capacity, be turning some small scrap of his towering mind towards him? Or was it vanity on Garro’s part to think he would even merit the notice of the Lord of Mankind? With the next heartbeat the captain’s breath caught in his throat as the light he watched glittered brightly, and then faded to nothing, dying before him. The blinded star vanished, leaving a dark pall over Nathaniel’s spirit.

Ullis Temeter hoped that Garro would not share such a fate. The day that the battle-captain was forced to step off the battle line would be the day the man’s spirit perished.

The awful realisation of it was, not that his kinsmen were ready to shake off the Emperor’s commands and embrace treachery, but that most of them were merely weapons. They would not pause when orders came to them, even if those orders were beyond their comprehension.

Only now that Kaleb was gone, did Garro understand how much he had valued the little man, as a sounding board, as a servant, as a comrade. For a moment the captain considered ditching the sack in the nearest ejector chute and making an end of it, but that would have been ignoble. Instead, with a gentleness belied by his large, heavy hands, Garro traced through Kaleb’s effects: utility

Despite his open rejection of such beliefs, the Emperor instilled such dedication and devotion. Immortal and all-seeing, possessed of the greatest intellect and psychic potential of any living human, in the eyes of the Lectitio Divinitatus, what else could he be but a divinity?

but what was he now? All the blades were blunted and twisted upon one another, the arrows broken about their shafts.

With every pounding step he took, a part of Temeter’s mind was reeling with the import of what was taking place. The bombs were falling, and there was only one person who could have sent them.

‘This death,’ rasped the voder, ‘this death is ours. We choose it. We deny you your victory.’

For a moment there was a tiny star on the battered plains outside the Choral City,

marking two more lives lost within a maelstrom of murder.