Konrad Curze the Night Haunter - Guy Haley Read online

  BACKLIST

  The Primarchs

  ANGRON: SLAVE OF NUCERIA

  CORAX: LORD OF SHADOWS

  JAGHATAI KHAN: WARHAWK OF CHOGORIS

  VULKAN: LORD OF DRAKES

  FERRUS MANUS: GORGON OF MEDUSA

  FULGRIM: THE PALATINE PHOENIX

  LORGAR: BEARER OF THE WORD

  PERTURABO: THE HAMMER OF OLYMPIA

  MAGNUS THE RED: MASTER OF PROSPERO

  LEMAN RUSS: THE GREAT WOLF

  ROBOUTE GUILLIMAN: LORD OF ULTRAMAR

  The Horus Heresy series

  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

  Book 42 – GARRO

  Book 43 – SHATTERED LEGIONS

  Book 44 – THE CRIMSON KING

  Book 45 – TALLARN

  Book 46 – RUINSTORM

  Book 47 – OLD EARTH

  Book 48 – BURDEN OF LOYALTY

  Book 49 – WOLFSBANE

  Book 50 – BORN OF FLAME

  Book 51 – SLAVES TO DARKNESS

  Book 52 – HERALDS OF THE SIEGE

  Book 53 – TITANDEATH

  Book 54 – THE BURIED DAGGER

  The Siege of Terra

  Book 1 – THE SOLAR WAR

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  The Horus Heresy

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘The Buried Dagger’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  THE HORUS HERESY

  It is a time of legend.

  Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Mankind conquer the stars in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races are to be smashed by his elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

  The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons. Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor, as system after system is brought back under his control. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful champions.

  First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superhuman beings who have led the Space Marine Legions in campaign after campaign. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation, while the Space Marines themselves are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

  Many are the tales told of these legendary beings. From the halls of the Imperial Palace on Terra to the outermost reaches of Ultima Segmentum, their deeds are known to be shaping the very future of the galaxy. But can such souls remain free of doubt and corruption forever? Or will the temptation of greater power prove too much for even the most loyal sons of the Emperor?

  The seeds of heresy have already been sown, and the start of the greatest war in the history of mankind is but a few years away...

  ‘Your presence does not surprise me, Assassin. I have known of you ever since your craft entered the Eastern Fringes. Why did I not have you killed? Because your mission and the act you are about to commit proves the truth of all I have ever said or done. I merely punished those who had wronged, just as your false Emperor now seeks to punish me. Death is nothing compared to vindication.’

  – The last words of Konrad Curze,

  primarch of the VIII Legion Astartes.

  ONE

  THE DARK

  Corpse-grey Tsagualsa turned under the light of a sickly star. A desert world in desert space, bereft of human settlement, and so far from the illumination of the Astronomican that it would likely stay that way forever. Of no consequential size, lacking moisture beyond the merest trace, Tsagualsa had nothing to recommend itself. And yet there were those that called it home.

  The Night Lords had claimed the world for themselves.

  Tsagualsa suited the VIII Legion’s temperament. A bitter place, born from gas and fire as all planets are, and with the potential that entails, but faltering in the final stages of development, never reaching the exultant flourish of life that worlds round kinder suns attain. Like its new masters, as the offspring of deficient parents themselves, the planet was doomed to stunted expressions of potential.

  The Night Lords had another name for the planet, bestowed with a Nostraman flair for poetry, and that was the Carrion World. Nostramans were habitual liars, and poetry is the liar’s art; Tsagualsa was so dry and dusty there was nothing alive to die to become carrion, and nothing to feed on it if it did. This lifeless state pleased their lord primarch, as an embodiment of the order he craved. Order flourished there for eternities. Nothing changed. Every mark on the planet’s surface was eventually wiped clean by abiotic winds and falls of shrouding dust. Dunes of grey sand built up and were worn down.

  Until the Night Lords came.

  Curze was a cancer, a creature of anarchy. The Carrion World remained changeless only while it was uninhabited. To Tsagualsa the Night Lords brought the sordid chaos of Nostramo.

  The fortress the VIII Legion built for their lord was the sole outpost of life. A vast castle of black rock, decorated with the mortal remains of their victims, in aspect it was entirely grim, though its more sickening displays of the torturer’s trade were artful in their macabre way. Tens of thousands of warriors required hundreds of thousands of slaves, who forged brute societies for themselves beneath the notice of their masters. The Legion existed in a state of contained anarchy. Discipline bled away by war and indifference until, only a handful of decades after the Warmaster failed to usurp the Emperor’s throne, they were a brotherhood in name, held together only by their common blood, and that final bond was fast dissolving in the acid of their father’s madness.

  On thankless, dried-up
Tsagualsa, the Night Lords waited for the end.

  Their father was going to die.

  He was going to die that very night.

  In the turret of a tower so high above the desolate plains it swayed in constant winds, a sculptor was at work. He hummed a tune few alive would recognise, a mindless merchant’s ditty from a world broken decades before.

  The sculptor ceased, stood back a moment to judge his work, and was displeased.

  The figure did not capture the features right. Yes, it sat still and cold in its throne, arms gripping the rests with the iron tenacity of rigor mortis, just as the man it depicted did. The statue was of human tissue, the flesh that constituted it stolen from living beings and employed as a sculptor’s clay, as was appropriate. Many hours of work had gone into the art, unhurried and precise, though its creator had few hours left to live.

  Still, it was not right.

  The sculptor was the sole living occupant of the chamber. The darkness was so complete, so profound, that to anything but heat sight or supernatural vision it was impenetrable. The sculptor had a little of both. None but he would have been able to see in that room.

  He was a living god, raised on a world of perpetual twilight, one of twenty incredible sons made by a man who was greater than them all, and who was himself a sculptor of sorts.

  Konrad Curze was his name, and though he had many gifts bestowed upon him by his father, sanity was not among them.

  ‘No, no, no,’ he said. To his far-spectrum vision, his breath was a glowing cloud in the frigid air. It was strange, Curze reflected in his saner moments. Dead Nostramo was often stifling. Its darkness he longed for, but the heat he never missed. He was naked except for a short cloak of black feathers that had seen better days, but he did not feel the cold.

  ‘This will not do.’ Pale hands slick with blood tore off the figure’s face. It was not its original, and came free easily, the neat sutures holding it in place bursting without much effort on Curze’s part. Discarded, the face slapped onto the floor, where it began to freeze.

  The man who made up the core of Curze’s flesh statue had been alive when the primarch started, nailed and screwed into place to be vivisected at leisure. His screams had enlivened the atmosphere, until he had selfishly died. Much of that first unfortunate had been replaced: his arms had grown long with extra joints, four mismatched legs were seated in place of the two he had started with, his torso was split and spliced with a second spine, his head had become a conglomeration of four broken skulls, and silence substituted for his voice.

  Curze stood back again. His bare feet padded on the freezing floor without discomfort. He placed his chin in his bloody hand, and looked over his work with a critical eye.

  ‘I really can’t capture the face,’ he said regretfully.

  He remembered it clearly enough; he was a primarch, and even one so damaged as he forgot nothing. But when he tried to capture the face he saw in his mind, it flowed away from him like blood gurgling into a gutter. Frustrated, he paced back and forth, pausing to stare at various angles.

  The chamber was large. There was one high window set into the wall that kept out the spearing light of stars. Tsagualsa’s air was thin, its sun weak, and not enough light troubled the surface of the world for most eyes to function at night, but Curze found starlight too bright to bear, and the panes of the window were a midnight collage of armourglass tinted to block it out. What image the tenebrous design depicted was impossible to say, even for him. That was a mercy, for the picture was of the most disturbing sort – the kind which, once seen, forever haunts the small hours, and chips madness from the rock of the sturdiest mind.

  To a mortal man the room would have been a terrifying dungeon ripe with death’s stink. Blind, that man would nevertheless have sensed Curze as a darkness in the dark.

  There had been mortal men in the chamber. They knew fear no longer.

  The walls were stone blended with bone wrenched from a thousand screaming victims. The floor was black iron, patterned with razor ridges, caked in frozen blood. The arms, legs, torsos, heads, brains, hearts, guts and voided shit of two dozen slaughtered mortals were strewn all around, in some places heaped together, all placed without thought or reason – the raw materials for Curze’s statue. More bodies hung from hooks riveted to the walls, the ragged remains of faces locked in death’s agonies.

  A sole space was neat: a circle around an iron lectern fashioned in the form of a bat’s outflung wings, which carried a heavy book bound in human skin.

  ‘What to do, what to do?’

  Curze tapped a black nail against his face, sighed, and went back to work. For another hour he ripped and tore and stitched, chewing flesh to softness when he needed to, before pressing the dripping putty into place. He spoke occasionally as he harvested his materials from the floor. Every soft sibilance – Nostraman was heavily blessed with them – whispered over the stone and bone, quiet and poisonous as snakes. Each smacking kiss made as he tore flesh from the piles of corpse parts echoed sharply. His breath rattled. It was a predator’s cave, full of a predator’s sounds. The abode of an ailing lion, close to death but all the deadlier because of it.

  Eventually he nodded in relief.

  ‘I think I almost have you, father,’ he said, and set himself on the finishing touches.

  It took him a while to fit the face he chose to the agglomerate skulls. He stretched it, warming it with tender care before tugging at it with teeth and hands. When he judged the face the correct size, he stitched it in place, taut as a drumskin. The stolen hide rebelled against its new shape, pulling hard against threads spun from human hair, but it held. Curze stepped back, a pleased hiss announcing he was satisfied.

  He padded to the far side of the room, and squatted down facing the figure, folding long arms in front of himself as a roosting bat might close its wings. His form had become more bestial since the days of the great betrayal. His fingers were long and clutching, his spine strained against the skin of his back, his ribs arching up to it like those of a vaulted roof, and in brighter places than the chamber, the webs of his veins were clear beneath his pallid skin. This corruption was not his fault. None of this was.

  The monstrous statue stared back at him in rigid quiet, its eyes sightless, stretched mouth tight with a rueful smile. Beneath the frozen blood painting the throne, gold glinted.

  Curze waited patiently for the figure to speak. Time ticked away towards his demise. Unlike the rapid flood of years of his long life, these last hours stretched ahead, wide and placid, a river close to its joining with the sea. Time at the end was slow and deep, wrinkled still with the turbulence of maybes, yet headed in one undeniable direction.

  He was going to die soon, in that palace, on that night, as he had always known.

  Curze felt no impatience. He was calm.

  ‘Father,’ said Curze with a wicked smile.

  The figure remained still. The composite jaw was locked, the elongated lips stretched immovably taut.

  Curze waited for the words to thump into his mind, and scatter their sadness all over his tattered soul.

  ‘Konrad Curze,’ he said at length, when the figure said nothing at all. Curze scowled and raked at his ear like a dog. ‘I don’t like that name. Why do you call me it?’

  The mess of body parts stared silently back.

  ‘Silent? So be it.’ Konrad Curze piled up a heap of limbs and sat upon it. ‘So. I am going to tell you a story,’ he said. ‘About why you are a very bad father.’ He tittered. A tic shook its way from his left elbow, up across his shoulders and through his face. It ended with a jerk in his neck that sent his filthy black hair swinging. Curze growled in annoyance at the involuntary movement, and when he spoke again he did so quickly, so that his speech would outpace his spasms.

  ‘You know what’s going to happen soon.’ He tilted his head, listening. ‘Can you hear the silence? This place is never quiet. Not ever. Do you know why it is?’ he said conspiratorially. ‘You know why, I k
now you. You know everything!’ His voice dropped. ‘My sons grieve my coming death. They hate me for not allowing them to prevent it.’ His gaze slid slyly around, coming to rest on a fused ribcage far bigger than a normal man’s on the far side of the room. ‘If they try to stop her, they’ll die, and they don’t want to die. So we will not be disturbed.’ He smirked, then composed himself. He managed to hold the mask of sanity before his tortured face when speaking with his sons, but it was hard not to show it here, speaking with his father. This was far more intimate.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, answering his thoughts as if the meat sculpture had voiced them. ‘This is you as father and I as son. When we are fathers, we must be strong. When we are sons, we can be weak, for our own fathers are strong for us. I believe that’s the way it’s supposed to work.’ He blinked eyes so dilated the iris was a nearly invisible, compressed band between sclera and pupil. Curze’s sneer dropped away. His expression became open, and ashamed. In that moment he appeared beautiful despite his degeneration.

  ‘Father, this is my confessional. I don’t expect you to forgive me.’ He said the last part loudly and fast, just in case the figure would offer forgiveness. ‘And I can never forgive you.’ He leaned forwards, his head jutting out on a neck that had grown too long. His bony shoulders hunched up over his head. In their cloak of feathers they resembled the wings of a scavenger bird held high off the carcass it fed upon. ‘I just want you to listen.’

  He implored his father silently. When no reply was forthcoming, the sneer returned, and his head jerked again.

  Curze giggled foolishly. He pressed his hands together before his face in a mockery of prayer.

  ‘Forgive me, father,’ he said in rasping High Gothic, ‘for I have sinned.’

  The Night Haunter waited for his father’s response to his joke. When none came, he frowned peevishly, and said with irritation, ‘How shall I enumerate your failures? Shall I tell you why your plans will wither eternally, and bear no fruit for Terra’s dead vines?’

  He cocked his head, listening to something only he could hear. ‘Right, yes. Of course,’ he nodded. He showed a grin filthy with black teeth. ‘I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t want to do that.

  ‘Listen to me, father, this one final time. This is my gospel. My last words before the final vindication.’ He snickered air through his sharpened teeth. ‘Let us start with how I came to be here, with my retrieval from that prison Sanguinius saw fit to put me in.’ He hunkered down. ‘We start with the beginning of the end.’