‘But regent?’ Sanguinius said. ‘That smacks of usurpation…’
‘It smacks of necessity,’ replied Guilliman. ‘If Terra and our father have gone, then so has Malcador. We must rally our shattered strength before it is too late. Neither the Lion nor I can stomach the other assuming the role, but we are unanimous when the choice is you.’
‘You always were the most like our father,’ said the Lion.
Sanguinius looked up at the light of the storm spilling through the chamber’s high windows.
‘Let me say, brother,’ said Guilliman, ‘you showed no great delight in being delivered from the storm and reunited with us. You seem troubled and burdened. That tear marked beneath your eye? Is that a new notation of your anguish?’
‘We have all seen troubles,’ said Sanguinius. ‘Brothers fight and fall, and the stars die. Daemons walk abroad. I fear that Old Night steals in upon us anew. I would rage against that.’
‘Then make your stand here, for now,’ said Guilliman. He stood up. ‘Take this oath of moment, and I will make a pledge. The first moment the storm abates, the first moment we see the light of Terra or hear word that she still stands, I will light my ship-drives, and, with all measure of my forces, guide your Legion back to the home world. There will be no delay or argument. We do not build a second empire here. We maintain the original, founded anew on this globe as circumstance demands.’
‘You would make this pledge to me?’ asked Sanguinius.
‘With all solemnity,’ Guilliman replied.
‘And you will back this?’ Sanguinius asked the Lion.
‘With my blood,’ the Lion replied.
Sanguinius sighed.
‘I notice, in the hours since I set foot upon the soil of Macragge, that there are no remembrancers in your court, nor in the retinue of the Lion.’
He regarded them.
‘Is this mere coincidence?’
‘Discretion,’ Guilliman replied. ‘If Terra stands, then future generations may see, whether true or not, a heresy and usurpation in the foundation we make here. I would not stain the memory or legacies of the loyal sons with such a smirch, however unintentioned. Therefore, I did conclude early in my deliberations, that no piece of this undertaking should become history until history it needs to be. No chronicles will be made, no remembrancers charged to observe this business and commemorate it. If Ultramar is all the Imperium we have, then in due time and with great effect, its histories will be written and will become the single Imperial record. But, if Terra yet survives, as I most dearly hope, then this will become, in future days, an unremembered empire, an unthinkable act undone and unthought.’
Sanguinius took a deep breath. ‘Then it is down to us? We three decide?’ he asked.
‘There is only us,’ said the Lion, rising to his feet.
‘Tell us, Sanguinius,’ Guilliman said, ‘which seat will you take at this table?’
It may have been the moment, or merely his imagination, but Magna Macragge Civitas seemed to glow, as it had done in more glorious years. The great towers and spires of the city shone with a golden lustre, as they had done in the first era of the Five Hundred Worlds.
The sky was full of ships. They moved overhead, in series and formation, a procession of honour and a display of might. High up, illumined by the light of the Pharos star, the great capital ships drifted like leviathans. Below them, in the lower atmosphere, formations of fighter craft and gunships made fly past after fly past. The six great war horns of the ancient Battle Kings sounded across the storm-lit Civitas in unison.
The streets were full. Cheering crowds filled every via and avenue, and processions of the Legiones Astartes, Army, Mechanicum and praecental forces converged from their various barracks and fortresses on the broad space of Martial Square.
Guilliman took the salute of the roaring crowds on the platform of the Propylae Titanicus.
He turned to the Lion at his side.
‘This we do?’ he asked.
The Lion nodded. ‘This we do, for it is right,’ he said.
Guilliman stepped to the side of his brother Sanguinius. He grasped his right wrist and raised his hand to the sky in triumph.
Sanguinius raised his head and looked out over the cheering sea of faces and punching fists. He allowed his hand to be thrust aloft. He spread his mighty wings in a salute, like the sign of the aquila.
At the top of his voice, Guilliman declared the regency, but the noise of the multitude was too great for the words to be heard.
25
Ends and
Beginnings
‘Alpha and Omega, the first and last, each within the other.’
– The Apocrypha Terra, date unknown
Lights came on. The heavy cell door opened. Titus Prayto stepped into the chamber.
Seated upon a metal bench and shackled by the throat, ankles and wrists to pins set in the rockcrete floor, Narek of the Word looked up, but did not speak.
‘So, friend. We begin again,’ said Prayto. ‘Will you say more today?’
‘There is no more to say,’ replied Narek.
‘You are hard to probe, Word Bearer, and hard to open,’ said Prayto. ‘I am impressed. Others would have broken days ago.’
‘There is nothing in me to break,’ said Narek.
‘Did you slay the lord primarch Vulkan?’ asked Prayto.
‘Asked and answered,’ Narek grumbled.
‘For the record today.’
‘No, I did not. Though I would have if I had possessed the means.’
‘Who did?’
‘I don’t know. I can only offer the conjecture that it was the immortal human known as John Grammaticus, or perhaps his unknown confederate.’
‘We have no record of a John Grammaticus on Macragge, or–’
‘I told you,’ said Narek. ‘Where he passes, he does not leave traces. I do not know what happened to him, but his aim was to slay Vulkan.’
‘What was the weapon he used?’
‘I do not understand it. A spear, forged from the power of the Emperor.’
‘And this is what he employed?’
‘Perhaps he did. Perhaps it was Curze. Curze was there too.’
‘What happened to Curze?’ asked Prayto.
‘I know not.’
‘Were the eldar present? There were clear signs of eldar munitions.’
‘No. Grammaticus’s confederate used those weapons. Though it was told to me that their masters are eldar-born.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Prayto.
‘Nothing else,’ said Narek of the Word.
Prayto stepped out of the cell, and closed the hatch. It slammed shut. In the gloomy corridor outside, one of the lowest level spurs in the Fortress of Hera, the Avenging Son stood waiting for him.
‘Has he changed his story?’ Guilliman asked.
‘There is not a hint of variance, my lord,’ Prayto reported. ‘He maintains this strange tale of immortal assassins and Curze. I cannot tell if it is true or false, but it matches the physical evidence, and from my read of him, he believes it utterly.’
‘He does not lie?’
‘He appears, my lord, to have no reason to do so.’
Guilliman shook his head.
‘I don’t understand. He’s a Word Bearer, reviled by our Legion more than any other. He’s on Macragge, alone, after Calth, yet he seems to display no guilt or shame or deceit, nor even fear.’
‘I think he is a very singular being, lord,’ said Prayto. ‘I think perhaps, he is a little similar to Warsmith Dantioch. A good man drawn by fate on the wrong side.’
‘He’s an ally?’ asked Guilliman.
‘Not like the warsmith. Dantioch has come over to us and renounced his Legion. Narek is still dangerous. He sees us as the enemy, and he remains true to his Legion. B
ut he is loyal.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Guilliman.
‘Each day, as I ask my questions to occupy his mind, I probe deeper to unlock the hidden truths. He is loyal to his Legion, but it is a loyalty to the spirit and foundation of his Legion, not to what his Legion has become. I see two things clearly.’
‘And they are?’
‘First, he is remarkably single-minded, determined. There is a fixed purpose in him that is almost frightening to read. The second thing is what that fixed purpose is. He wants, with an urgency that is alarming, to kill your brother Lorgar. It is all he lives for.’
‘Is this an act?’ asked Guilliman.
‘If it is, it’s the best piece of psychic conditioning I’ve ever read,’ Prayto replied. ‘What do we do?’
‘Come back tomorrow and ask him the same questions,’ said Guilliman. ‘Keep doing that, every day, until we have the truth.’
‘And then, lord?’
‘And then,’ said Guilliman, ‘I will order his execution as a traitor and a heretic.’
He woke up, and knew the pain of life again. Without even opening his eyes, he knew that he was on a craftworld.
He could smell the eldar.
He sat up. The chamber was small. He was on a cot which, like the rest of the room, was made of wraithbone. It glowed with an inner light that he found nauseating.
‘You brought me back,’ he said.
‘Oh, I had to, Johnny,’ said Damon Prytanis. ‘Never leave a man behind, and all that.’
‘I mean, to life.’
‘Yeah, that was their choice. After what you pulled, Johnny, I think they want you alive enough to punish you soundly.’
John sighed.
‘Vulkan?’
‘He stayed dead. Your trick didn’t work. Plus, it killed you. It was stupid, Johnny. Technically, you completed the mission. But they know what you were really trying to do.’
‘Why? Because you told them?’
‘I didn’t have to,’ Damon Prytanis replied. ‘Gahet’s waiting for you. Slau Dha too. They want to know who you’ve been talking to. They want to know where you’re getting these ideas from. They want to know what else you might have done.’
He paused. He rubbed the dressings on his throat and jaw.
‘Basically, they want to know how you’ve betrayed them,’ he said, ‘and why.’
‘Because I’m human,’ said John Grammaticus.
Prytanis laughed.
‘Funny, actually. Because that’s true now. That crazy stunt? Pushing your life energy into Vulkan? It took everything out of you. It took everything, Johnny. They brought you back to life, but it’s the only one you have left. They can’t do it again. You’re not a Perpetual any more, Johnny, you’re just a man. You’ve got one life remaining, and they’re going to tell you exactly how you’re going to spend it.’
The door behind Damon Prytanis hummed open.
‘They’re ready,’ he said. ‘Shall we?’
The deep vault was silent. The memorial flame fluttered on its stand. Zytos knelt beside the golden casket.
The sound came and went so quickly that Zytos thought it was in his imagination. He waited, listening. It did not come again.
He waited longer, willing it to return.
It did not repeat.
It had merely been in his imagination.
For a second, he thought he had heard a heartbeat, the du-dunt of a single heartbeat.
But no. It was wishful thinking.
Zytos of the Salamanders bowed his head and resumed his mourning vigil.
Realspace tore open like a gut wound. A bloody, mangled figure tumbled out, lean limbs flailing, and left red stains on the mountain snow as he rolled down the slope. Behind him, the realspace tear bulged and spasmed. The torn and wet mass of Ushpetkhar, choking on its own black ichor, shuddered and died, collapsing backwards into the warp and closing the tear behind it.
At last. Dead at last. The combat had been far too long and far too gruelling. How many days, how many weeks had it lasted in that no-place, no-time wasteland of the immaterium?
Almost dead, cadaverously thin, and soaked wet-black from head to toe in daemon blood, Konrad Curze got to his feet. He was shaking with cold, pain and hunger.
He looked around with his wild, black-within-black eyes, struggling to identify his location. He was high in a range of mountains, huge mountains, snow-capped. A single toxic star shone in the storm-ruined sky.
His visions began to flow again. They ran through his demented mind like shadow-play. They showed him that a city lay not far off, perhaps just a fortnight’s trek through the mountains. It was a great golden city on a coastal plain, watched over by a mighty fortress.
Magna Macragge Civitas.
His visions showed him the cheering crowds, the streets full of people, the great triumph of the declaration. He saw the Lion and Guilliman, alive after all. Alive after all. He saw Sanguinius between them, proclaimed as master of mankind.
They were trying to save the Imperium by shoring it up on Ultramar and the Five Hundred Worlds, and declaring it re-founded.
Curze began to laugh.
It was nothing. It was pitiful. It was an empty gesture made by desperate men obsessed by notions of nobility.
It was just another empire for him to raze to the ground and annihilate.
He started to walk.
He left many bloody footprints in the snow behind him.
Afterword
‘I have come to the conclusion that the making of laws
is like the making of sausages – the less you know about
the process, the more you respect the result.’
…as Bismarck apparently never said. I find myself adding to that proverbial list The Unremembered Empire. Indeed there are quite a few things whose manufacture I think we’re all better off not witnessing. One would be ‘cheese smoke’, as Guy Haley will readily agree.
My point, and I can confirm that I do have one, is that during the much-longer-than-I-expected period of time that it took to write The Unremembered Empire, I said far too many times to far too many people, ‘It’s the hardest writing job I’ve ever done.’
No one wants to know that. Not really. For one thing, it sounds like a boast, for another it sets up unnecessary expectations (‘Oh, Dan’s written forty kazonkajillion novels, and if he says this has been the hardest, then it must be the best!’). What I should have done is remained tight-lipped on the subject, and allowed the book to speak for itself. Indeed, whatever its comparative difficulties, if I’ve done my job properly, it should read as a fluid whole, with the reader utterly oblivious to all the backstage heavy-lifting, grunt-work and duck-paddling that went on. I hope so. It’s not supposed to be a hard thing to read.
But I did mention it, severally, so I might as well expand on that theme now that the cat’s out of the bag. Just this once.
The trick to any series is total immersion in the story’s continuity. Not just to know the background, so as to sustain a credible world or universe, but to reference and interlock ideas, characters and themes in interesting and revealing ways. An example of the former might be knowing that Guilliman goes on to write the Codex Astartes, and using that knowledge to characterise him as a man of theory and structure, possessed of an ordered, martial mind. An example of the latter might be remembering that Guilliman goes on to write the Codex Astartes, and thus sow the seeds of the need of that codification here, as he struggles to bind the disparate elements of the Shattered Legions into a cohesive whole.
Series of books always bring with them the burden of exponential continuity mass. I know this full well: the Gaunt’s Ghosts series is fourteen books long, and I need pie charts and spread sheets to keep track of all the character details (my first job when starting a new Gaunt book is to update my character f
ile to include characters killed or injured in the previous volume – and there’s always at least one that comes as a surprise to me). Similar problems arise with the Inquisitor series of Eisenhorn/Ravenor/Bequin (currently only seven books long). At least they’re my series. I’m the only one writing them, and I’m the only one responsible for weaving the continuity, so if I blunder, it’s all me.
The Horus Heresy series is a collective effort. The overall story already exists and is known to the readership, and we’re reconstructing it as a team in the form of a relay, adding details. Now, we have lots of meetings, and we read each other’s stuff, but oh my god, it’s so easy to forget who said what specifically about whom and where they said it to be easily able to check it and maintain consistency.
Knowing that, it was perhaps foolhardy of me to choose to write a novel that is not only the direct sequel to my last Horus Heresy novel, Know No Fear, but which also picks up direct or indirect storylines from getting on for ten other novels and short stories. One of the main strands of The Unremembered Empire comes from James Swallow’s Blood Angels work, thus making The Unremembered Empire a direct sequel to Fear To Tread. It’s also a sequel to Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Betrayer. It’s also also a direct sequel to Nick Kyme’s Vulkan Lives. It also follows directly the stories ‘The Lion’ by Gav Thorpe, ‘Rules of Engagement’ by Graham McNeill, ‘Savage Weapons’ and ‘Prince of Crows’ by Aaron, ‘The Iron Within’ by Rob Sanders and ‘The Crimson Fist’ by John French, not to mention pretty much all of the Mark of Calth anthology. And those are just the major reference points.
The Unremembered Empire, for no better reasons than where it falls in the story and what it portrays, is a kind of nexus novel, drawing together many different strands and characters, repositioning them, realigning them and setting them on new and divergent paths.
And, man oh man, are they some difficult sausages to make!
A book usually develops a flow so that, in any given session, I can get lost in the pattern after a few hundred words or so, and a two or three thousand word chunk just flies by. With this one, it felt as if I were stopping every sentence or two because I had to check or recheck another fact. Which hand did Alexis Polux lose again? The Dark Angels… Still in black at this point, not yet in green? How many moons does Macragge have, Graham? Gav, exactly how does the xenos tech on the Invincible Reason work? Wait, wait, Sevatar is still a captive of the Dark Angels at this time? For really reals?