Lion El'Jonson- Lord of the First - David Guymer Read online

  THE HORUS HERESY®

  The Primarchs

  KONRAD CURZE: THE NIGHT HAUNTER

  Guy Haley

  ANGRON: SLAVE OF NUCERIA

  Ian St. Martin

  CORAX: LORD OF SHADOWS

  Guy Haley

  VULKAN: LORD OF DRAKES

  David Annandale

  JAGHATAI KHAN: WARHAWK OF CHOGORIS

  Chris Wraight

  FERRUS MANUS: GORGON OF MEDUSA

  David Guymer

  FULGRIM: THE PALATINE PHOENIX

  Josh Reynolds

  LORGAR: BEARER OF THE WORD

  Gav Thorpe

  PERTURABO: HAMMER OF OLYMPIA

  Guy Haley

  MAGNUS THE RED: MASTER OF PROSPERO

  Graham McNeill

  LEMAN RUSS: THE GREAT WOLF

  Chris Wraight

  ROBOUTE GUILLIMAN: LORD OF ULTRAMAR

  David Annandale

  Also available

  KONRAD CURZE: A LESSON IN DARKNESS

  Ian St. Martin (audio drama)

  SONS OF THE EMPEROR

  Various Authors

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  A Black Library Publication

  The Horus Heresy

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  About the Author

  eBook license

  A Black Library Publication

  First published in Great Britain in 2020

  This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,

  Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

  Cover illustration by Mikhail Savier.

  Lion El'Jonson: Lord of the First © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2020. Lion El'Jonson: Lord of the First, The Horus Heresy Primarchs, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.

  All Rights Reserved.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-78193-976-5

  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 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

  games-workshop.com

  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...

  IMPERATOR SOMNIUM

  Lion El'Jonson had never seen his father's face.

  Jaghatai Khan would describe it as weather-beaten and unsmiling, the face of one who had ridden under every sun and counted every blade of grass. Russ spoke of eyes that masked great depths of black humour as well as wisdom, whereas Vulkan, if moved by victory's bloody wake to melancholia, would tell of a countenance worn past expression by the cares of the galaxy, tanned and darkened by the hard toil of humanity's forge.

  Theirs were vague descriptions, never beholden to detail. What color were His eyes? How tall was He? What mark, if any, did He bear upon His skin?

  Meetings with the Master of Mankind were disorienting experiences, subject to the lassitudes of memory even to beings as mighty as His own sons.

  The Emperor and the Lion met infrequently, and when the goings of the First Expedition and the Fourth allowed for a reunion they spoke but little. They were alike, father and son. More so, perhaps, than any of the Lion's brothers, for, whatever their view or wish on the matter, there was but one amongst them with claim to being His firstborn. What one wished to convey the other would know, often without the need for words. That which either felt best left unsaid would remain so. The Emperor withheld much. This the Lion knew, though he did not begrudge Him His confidences. Equally, he did not begrudge the knowledge that no secret of his was unbeknownst to the Emperor.

  ‘Amon spoke to me of your great victory at Gorro, father,' said the Lion, eyes hooded, voice neutral.

  'It was a victory,' said the Emperor. 'Greatness, however, is relative. Had you heard it from the Luna Wolves instead of my Custodes then it would have become greater again.'

  'Cannot both be true?'

  'There have always been those who would champion the merits of perception, instinct, or faith over Empirical Truth. But facts are immutable, regardless of who or what perceives them. Power will always belong to the one who knows them. To one accustomed to small triumphs, every victory is great. It is in my gift, and in yours, to see beyond.'

  The Lion nodded, waiting, but the Emperor said nothing further.

  ‘Where would you have me go next?' said the Lion.

  'Where you must.'

  To the Lion, the Emperor appeared as a hooded figure, armoured in emerald plate, inscrutable with gilt and filigree and shrouded in robes of gold, wreathed in obscuring light.

  Everything his brothers described was a mask.

  Only the Lion beheld the truth.

  ONE

  I

  Norlev hated the ship.

  He hated the high-frequency whine of her three hundred-year-old plasma combustors. He had barely slept since his transfer from the laser defense platforms on Muspel. Even with the ship at its geostationary low anchorage over the capitolis complex at Sheitansvar, which it always was, even when the reactors were only working to minimum power requirements, which they always were, Norlev could feel the trembling through the bulkhead beside his bunk. When he did manage to sleep he had bad dreams - dreams of shivering cold, claws on the other side of the metal - and he w
ould rise less rested than he had begun. He hated that it was always too cold, and he hated that it was always too dark. He hated that the vox-satellites were still down. He hadn't been able to relay a message to Anastana and his sons in six months.

  But most of all he hated the damned ship.

  Her name was the Obrin. Together with another two dozen out-of-date warships and semi-derelicts, she had been left behind when the Crusade fleet had moved on to brighter worlds. Much like Norlev. Had it been Norlev's decision he would have scrapped the lot and recycled the plans.

  Maybe then the vox-satellites would be working.

  Ignoring his crewmates in the armsmen's dormitory, Norlev walked straight for his locker.

  He despised its utilitarian gunmetal finish, the squeak it made as it opened. As if mankind could bring light and reason to the galaxy, but not a tube of oil. The scuffed mirror on the door's inside winked as it crossed the light from the Iho-brown lumen strip, suspended in a nest of crash webbing and naked cables.

  Norlev glanced into the mirror, his eyes widening momentarily before sliding across his reflection like a spotlight over smoke.

  Behind him Yansliev and Valdimir sat in fold-down alum-frame chairs. Empty ranka glasses and coloured gaming tokens littered the screw-in table that folded down from the wall between them. In the bunk beside them, Gitr lay in the single cot, still fully clothed in a cadet's uniform and an unbuckled flak vest, having apparently forgotten to undress, staring blankly at the rivets in the ceiling. The local recruits were all like that. The planet was full of them. Norlev hated their bovine docility.

  What angered him more, he realised, was that he was sure he was starting to notice the same placid traits in himself. An hour lost here, a half there, gazing at walls, overlooking the everyday jibes of his crewmates until it was too late to respond.

  Reaching into the locker for his uniform, Norlev pulled on his belt. He drew the sidearm from the holster and checked the load. Voss-pattern Mark IV autopistol, a single box magazine, carrying thirty high-dispersal rounds.

  'What're you doing, Norlev?'

  Valdimir looked up from his game, his face so much like that of a drunken dog Norlev was surprised he didn't pant as well as drool. 'Red shift doesn't start for another six hours.'

  'Not another kit inspection, is it?' said Yansliev, leaning across the table with the bottle to spill more oxide-red ranka over Valdimir's glass, drill or no drill.

  By the Emperor, they were as much a disgrace to the uniform as the local mobs.

  He closed the locker and turned around.

  'Gavnat,' Valdimir swore. 'What's happened to your face?'

  Norlev shot him between the eyes.

  The flechette-burst shredded most of the officer's face as well as Yansliev's hand. The ranka bottle exploded. Yansliev screamed. Not at Norlev though. Not at the autopistol. At the bloodied claw of his hand. Bits of glass and flechette stuck out of it, glittering like an unwrapped gift under the swaying lumen strip. The association was a jarring one, from a time when Norlev had been able to feel, when he hadn't felt so... different, and something within him forced the recollection down. He fired again. Another half-second squeeze delivered fifteen rounds until there was nothing left of Yansliev's head but meat dripping from a wet skull.

  Gitr was still lying in his bunk, still staring blankly, but this time at Norlev, or through him, as though he could see something wondrous written inside the back of his skull.

  Something prompted Norlev to lower his weapon.

  He did.

  A whisper reached into his thoughts from beyond the void.

  'Yes,' he murmured, like a man half asleep.

  A distant star pulsed, as if for him alone, and he basked in the cold light of its approval.

  'I know the way to the nearest armoury locker.'

  Behind him Gitr turned back to the rivets in the ceiling, ignoring the blood on his cadet's uniform, as Norlev slotted a fresh magazine into his autopistol and stepped into the corridor.

  * * *

  II

  'Take us in,' said Duriel. His voice was low, a habit of the forest, barely even registering to unaugmented ears as a whisper.

  'Weapons?' said Stenius.

  'Not yet.'

  The Invincible Reason had achieved complete translation into the Muspel System approximately twenty-one hours previously, and had been decelerating for the last ten. Attended by a silent entourage of battleships, cruisers and escorts, a splinter battlegroup of the Fourth Expedition Fleet sailing under the temporary, anonymous ident-colours of the 2003rd, she had made her long voyage from the darkness of the system Oort cloud under a cloak of secrecy. She had broadcast no transponder sequences or auto-identifier codes. She had made no attempt at hailing the planet's Imperial authorities. Only now, the planet a cloud-swathed blue orb filling their screens, did the command crew commence pre-fire rituals on the behemoth warship's void shield arrays and weapons systems.

  The Lion, as was his custom, had shared little of the purpose behind this course, even with those whom rank and veterancy qualified as confidantes. Duriel, as was the custom of every Dark Angel, had spent the bulk of the last day-cycle catching up to his primarch's thinking.

  'What in the Emperor's name is going on out there?'

  Duriel, captain of the 12th Order, senior forge-wright and master of the Ironwing, castellan of the Invincible Reason, lowered the slate he had been studying. Plugged into the cogitation-dense instrumentarium of the Gloriana-class capital ship's primary command dais, the slate was superfluous, a prompt at best, an affectation at worst. If asked, he would say that he savoured the tactile experience of 'reading'. Even if his artificer harness had already in-loaded the data in bulk and dumped it via the connection nodes imbedded in his black carapace directly into his spinal column.

  He was, as his tutors in the Emperor's forges of Narodnya and Manraga would often despair, as stuck in his ways as a five-millennia-old cogitator when he chose to be.

  The Legion flagship's central dais was a rock of adamantium struts and insulated cabling, buffeted from all sides by a sea of system noise and glittering lights. To stand there and listen, to actually listen, was to lose oneself to a seethe of warring linguistic forms. Mortal human crewmen whispered to one another in Gothic, both low and High, impenetrable technical jargon and a plethora of dialects from a score of disparate worlds. Cogitators issued binharic clicks, heavily accented with the numeral-forms of their Terran, Martian and Jovian birthplaces. Red-robed machine-priests muttered in the harsh sing-song of lingua-technis. Armoured legionaries, stationed about the deck like angelic statuary, addressed one another curtly in Legion battle-cant or in any one of the dozens of Calibanite languages officially codified lingua mortis by the census takers of the Great Crusade.

  Duriel, and in the absence of the Lion perhaps only Duriel, could follow it all.

  He was not sure if his talent for language was one he had possessed before his ascension to the ranks of angels, for the opportunity to discover it had never arisen in the forest encampment in which he had lived as a child. He had not then met a man to whom he was not related, much less heard one speak another language, before the Legion recruiter had come to take him to Aldurukh.

  The bridge's cathedral-like ceiling was paned with sloping plates of armourglass, ultra-hard and toughened with void frost, baring the deck to the scattered lights of the void. Only a handful of stars were visible. The rest had been bleached out by the albedo of the bright, blue-green crescent that was their destination.

  Muspel.

  Duriel felt ihe nape of his neck prickle, the way it once had when something he was not yet consciously aware of stalked him through the trees.

  'What do you see out there, lord?’ he murmured to himself, at a register below even his habitual whisper.

  'What do they say, brother?' said Farith Redloss, nodding towards the slate in Duriel’s hand. As master of the Dreadwing his rank and Duriel's were technically equal, but aboard the Invincib
le Reason, the additional title of castellan gave Duriel sovereignty. Though Redloss called him brother, he posed his question with the due respect.

  'Little that I am at liberty to share.'

  Redloss grunted, but pressed no further.

  Duriel smiled, his planned response interrupted by the frustrated burr of a Mechanicum priest below the main dais, struggling again with the command systems' Himalazian base code.

  The forge-wrights of the Ironwing were, insofar as Duriel knew, a unique brotherhood amongst the legiones Astartes, serving as a parallel and independent reservoir of machine lore to that provided by the Legion's Techmarines. Following in the footsteps of their earliest forebears, they learned their arts from the engineSires and artisan-lords of the Throneworld's ancient forges - the very same forges that, long after they had tutored the antecedents of the First Legion in machinecraft, would go on to host Fulgrim and Vulkan and Ferrus Manus. The First Legion as a whole, too, still received the bulk of its consumables and equipment from Terra rather than from any of the forge worlds that had been swallowed up by the growing Imperium - much to the occasional chagrin of the Expedition's vestigial Mechanicum complement. Regardless of how far the Expedition journeyed from the Throneworld, however many times it had split and split again, this preference had remained in place. To most outsiders who had served prior terms of service on other Expedition vessels, the experience of a First Legion warship was one, initially at least, of horror, spent wondering how any craft as complicated as a Gloriana could function without a horde of crimson robes beetling about its interiors. The truth was that the forge-wrights and Techmarines were capable of tending to all but the most arcane and intemperate of their technologies themselves, and did so.

  Duriel was the master of a select order, a caretaker of its secrets as much as its technologies, and even he was not privy to why any of this should be so.

  He had his theories.

  He scratched thoughtfully at his beard, his hand un-gauntleted but sheathed in signus rings and digital lasers. It was a mortal habit that, he knew, brought his brothers in the Council of Masters no shortage of amusement.