He was not dead.
Nor was he alone.
In the centre of the laboratory a life or death struggle was under way. Two monsters of immense proportions fought with their creator and the master of this abode of the damned, Apothecary Fabius. One of the terata was a broken abomination of crooked limbs, its body swelling with mutant growths and hyper-evolving anatomy. The other sprouted new limbs with every breath, fresh organs and innumerable unfathomable body parts.
Yet amid all their hideous deformations, Lucius saw Legion markings on their flesh, swollen and twisted by their nightmarish transformation. Whatever these terata were on their way to becoming, they had both once been Imperial Fists.
Fabius fought the terata with a spike-topped rod and a wide-bore pistol that fired streaking rounds. Each impact detonated with virulent toxins, but each one seemed only to make the mutating beasts stronger. Only the flames were hurting them, and their supra-engineered flesh was potent fuel to the fire.
‘Lucius!’ screamed Fabius. ‘Help me! Save the gene-samples!’
Lucius had no interest in obeying the orders of the likes of Fabius, but reasoned that being owed a favour by someone with the Apothecary’s talents might be no bad thing. He swung himself from the gurney and scanned the workbenches lining the walls for the most useful-looking piece of apparatus, something that might fit the description.
At length he decided upon a silver cryo-storage case fixed to the wall by a series of coolant pipes and monitoring cables. Lucius fought past the flames, his armour proof against the worst of the heat, but he wore no helmet and the skin of his scarred face was blistering in the heat, and what little hair remained on his skull was burned away, never to return.
The pain was sublime.
One of the terata fell, pierced through by Fabius’s lethal maul, its body collapsing under the weight of its uncontrollable mutations. The other was aflame from head to foot, the flesh running from its twisted bones like hot wax. Fabius shot it in the head, and its spine cracked as an evolutionary spurt broke it apart.
Lucius took hold of the storage case and ripped it from the wall. Hot fluids sprayed him from the severed feed lines and the biological stink of it was a combination of ammoniac piss and organic waste. The sides of the box were red hot, and he roared in pain even as his mind lit up with pleasure.
‘Go!’ shouted Fabius, pushing through the laboratory as the flames spread to the drums of explosive elements. Thudding blasts from deeper in the apothecarion shook the chamber and sheets of billowing flame roared towards them.
Lucius turned and ran for the exit, following Fabius out into the corridor beyond.
Fabius hammered the door mechanism, and the armoured shutter slammed down. Even through the blast-shielded plasteel, Lucius could feel the intense heat and the percussive detonation of chemical vats.
‘Quickly!’ snapped Fabius. ‘The gene-samples, give them to me. They need to be kept frozen or they become non-viable.’
Lucius set down the cryo-storage case and disengaged the hermetic seal. Vapour spilled from the case as the upper half of the container slid clear. Fabius worked feverishly on his heavily modified narthecium gauntlet, opening a cylindrical vacuum flask capable of holding a number of sample tubes.
Lucius saw a row of twelve zygote tubes, some misted with heat damage and others cracked and leaking. Illuminators ran the length of the case, one for each tube. All but one glowed an angry, useless red.
‘Give it to me!’ shouted Fabius. ‘Now.’
Lucius unsnapped the last tube, its smooth metallic surface scorched and warped, yet the genetic material inside it miraculously still viable. Fabius snatched the tube from his grasp and twisted the pressure cap onto the receiver socket of his narthecium. The mechanism hissed with pressure differential and the containment level dropped until the zygote tube was emptied.
‘Only one,’ said Fabius in bitter disappointment, hurling the zygote tube down the corridor in frustration. ‘All that work, all that time spent, and only one survives.’
‘What happened in there?’ asked Lucius.
Fabius waved away his question. ‘Nothing of any concern to the likes of you, swordsman. I could ask you the same thing. When the Phoenician brought you to me you were cold and dead. How is it that you live?’
Lucius shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Death doesn’t want me yet.’
Fabius gave a short bark of laughter, grim and humourless.
‘Perhaps I could learn something from you then,’ said the Apothecary, staring at him with predatory malice. Lucius rose to his feet, sensing that to remain here would be dangerous. He walked away from the burning ruin of the apothecarion without looking back. By the time he reached a junction in the corridor, he felt stronger and more powerful than ever before, a dark prince among men.
Something crunched beneath his boot and he reached down to lift the empty zygote tube Fabius had thrown away. Its surface was black and yellow with heat damage, but a line of text could still be seen etched onto its side.
Lucius held it up to the glow of the lumens, but whatever had been written there was mostly illegible.
It looked like a name, but one he could only partially make out.
‘Hon… Sou,’ he read.
Afterword
One of the things I’ve enjoyed most in writing about the traitor primarchs is delving deeper into why they turned from the Emperor and embraced treachery. To walk alongside Fulgrim as he descended into madness and to have stood beside Magnus as his world burned was incredibly satisfying, but they were primarchs who fell through trying to do the right thing. With those primarchs, I’d taken pains to make them sympathetic and have their falls portrayed in a way that made them tragic rather than simply treacherous.
But with Angel Exterminatus, I had a chance to tell the story of a primarch who’d gone over to Horus without high-minded notions of perfection or raising mankind to a new psychic awareness. Perturabo willingly embraced betrayal because he couldn’t see a way out of the rut he’d been driven into and the genocide he’d unleashed. Guilt and shame are powerful motivators, and to avoid facing them, the path of least resistance is often the one that takes you deeper into trouble.
When I was planning this book’s outline, I conceived it as a spiritual sequel to Fulgrim, a continuation of the Emperor’s Children’s story, but the more I wrote and the more it opened up to me, the more I realised that it wasn’t their story at all. Sure, they’re major players in the narrative, but this is well and truly Perturabo’s story.
Here was a primarch who found himself allied to the Warmaster without having been plied with obvious seductions of Chaos or the lures placed before primarchs like Angron and Mortarion. Why did a previously honourable warrior like Perturabo choose to destroy what he had helped build? That’s what’s at the heart of Angel Exterminatus, where we see portions of the Iron Warriors back story emerge over the course of their association with the Emperor’s Children, a slow unveiling of the deep wound in their psyche.
It’s a story that reminds us that even though the Warmaster’s forces are allied, old rivalries and divisions that existed between the Legions are still there and are only ever likely to get worse. And Fulgrim’s willingness to sacrifice his brother for the sake of his own selfish wants is a measure of how thoroughly he’s embraced the Ruinous Powers.
The Dark Prince is a demanding master, but the Lord of Iron is well-named.
And now Perturabo has a score to settle.
Graham McNeill
May 2012
About the Author
Graham McNeill has written more than twenty novels for Black Library. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller and his Time of Legends novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award. Originally hailing from Scotland, Graham now lives and works in Nottingham.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
/>
Cover illustration by Neil Roberts
© Games Workshop Limited, 2012. All rights reserved.
Black Library, the Black Library logo, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated marks, names, characters, illustrations and images from the Warhammer universe are either ®, TM and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2012, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world. All rights reserved.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-85787-912-7
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise except as expressly permitted under license from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
See the Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com
Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
www.games-workshop.com
eBook license
This license is made between:
Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and
(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)
(jointly, “the parties”)
These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:
* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:
o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;
o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and
* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.
* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:
o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;
o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;
o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;
o 3.4 You attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.
* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.
* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.
* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.
* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.
* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.
* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.
* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.
Graham McNeill, Angel Exterminatus
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends