The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit
- Автор: МакНилл Грэхем
- Год: 2014
- Язык: английский
- Год: Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd.
- ISBN: 978-1-78251-547-0
- Жанр: Боевая фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit». Краткое содержание книги:
ABOUT THIS EDITION
Includes 4 specially commissioned illustrations by Tiernen Trevallion, as well as an exclusive afterword by the author.
One a willing host, the other a willing sacrifice.
The book had enabled Horus to learn much of the Red Angel’s origins on blood-soaked Signus Prime. Just as it had allowed him to pass the rites of summoning to Maloghurst.
The words Horus spoke were not words as such, but harmonics resonating in an alternate plane of existence like musical notes or a key in a lock. Their use reeked of black magic, a term at which Lorgar sneered, but the term fit better than his Colchisian brother knew.
With each couplet, the chains encircling the Red Angel pulled tighter. All but one. Its armour creaked and split still further. Hissing white flame licked at the cracks. The chain encircling its skull melted away, dribbling from its mouth in white-hot rivulets.
‘Is that wise?’ asked Noctua as the Red Angel spat out the last of its binding.
‘Probably not, Grael, but needs must.’
The Red Angel turned its burning eye-sockets upon Horus.
‘I am a weapon, Horus Lupercal, the agonies of a thousand damned souls distilled into a being of purest rage,’ it said. ‘And you keep me bound with chains of cold iron and ancient wards? I hunger to slay, to maim, to wreak havoc on those that once called this shell brother!’
Its words were like hooked barbs drawn through the ear. Anger bled from the daemon, and Horus felt himself touched by its power.
‘You will have your share of blood,’ said Horus.
‘Yes,’ said the Red Angel, sniffing the air and licking its lipless face with a blackened tongue. ‘The enemy host musters before you in numbers uncounted. Millions of hearts to devour, an age of suffering to be wrought upon bones of the dead. A wasteland of corpses shall be the playthings of the letters of blood.’
Noctua turned to Ger Gerradon and said. ‘Are all warp things so ridiculously overwrought?’
Gerradon grinned. ‘Those that serve the lord of murder do enjoy some bloody hyperbole, certainly.’
‘And who do you serve?’ asked Horus.
‘You, my lord,’ said Gerradon. ‘Only you.’
Horus doubted that, but this wasn’t the time for questions of loyalty. He required information, the kind that could only be harvested from beings not of this world.
‘The death of my father’s sentinel in the mountain has revealed many things to me, but there are still things I want to know.’
‘All you need know is that there are enemies whose blood has yet to be shed,’ said the Red Angel. ‘Unleash me! I will bathe in an ocean of blood as deep as the stars.’
‘No,’ said Horus, unsheathing the claws within his talon and turning to stab them through the chest of the Red Angel. ‘I need to know quite a bit more than that, actually.’
The Red Angel screamed, a blast of superheated air that billowed the roof of the war tent. The chains creaked and spat motes of flickering warp energy. Cracks spread over the daemon’s face, as though the flames enveloping it now had license to consume it.
‘I will extinguish you,’ said Horus. ‘Unless you tell me what I want to know. What will I find beneath Lupercalia?’
‘A gateway to the realm beyond dreams and nightmares,’ hissed the unravelling daemon, cracks spreading down its neck and over the plates of its armour. ‘A ruinous realm of madness and death for mortals, the uttermost domain of misrule wherein dwell the gods of the True Pantheon!’
Horus pushed his claws deeper into the Red Angel’s chest.
‘Something a little less vague would be better,’ said Horus.
Despite its agony, the Red Angel laughed, the sound dousing the last flames in the firepit. ‘You seek clarity where none exists, Warmaster. The Empyreal Realm offers no easy definitions, no comprehension and no solidity for mortals. It is an ever-shifting maelstrom of power and vitality. What you seek I cannot give you.’
‘You’re lying,’ said Horus. ‘Tell me how I can follow my father. Tell me of the Obsidian Way that leads to the House of Eyes, the Brass Citadel, the Eternal City and the Arbours of Entropy.’
The Red Angel bared its teeth at Ger Gerradon in a blast of fury. The chains binding its arms creaked. The links stretched.
‘You betray your own kind, Tormaggedon! You name what should not be named!’
Gerradon shrugged. ‘Horus Lupercal is and always was my master, I serve him now. But even I don’t know the things you know.’
‘The Obsidian Way is forbidden to mortals,’ said the Red Angel.
‘Forbidden doesn’t mean impossible,’ said Horus.
‘Just because the faithless Forethinker walked the road of bones does not mean you can follow Him,’ hissed the Red Angel. ‘You are not Him, you can never be Him. You are His bastard son, the aborted get of what He was and will one day be.’
Horus twisted his talons deeper, feeling only a hollow space of scorched organs and ashen flesh within.
‘You cannot end me, mortal!’ cried the daemon. ‘I am a thing of Chaos Eternal, a reaper of blood and souls. I will endure any torments you can devise.’
‘Perhaps you can, but I didn’t devise these torments,’ said Horus, nodding towards the flayed-skin book. ‘Your kind did.’
Horus spoke words of power and the Red Angel screamed as the spreading black veins thickened and stretched. Smoke streamed from its limbs, coming not from its fires, but the dissolution of its very essence.
‘I have your attention now?’ asked Horus, clenching a taloned fist within the Red Angel’s body. ‘I can tear your flames apart and consign every scrap of you to oblivion. Think on that when you next speak.’
The Red Angel sagged against its chains.
‘Speak,’ it hissed. ‘Speak and I will answer.’
‘The Obsidian Way,’ said Horus. ‘How can it be breached?’
‘As with all things,’ snarled the daemon. ‘In blood.’
‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said Horus.
The Red Angel fell slack in its chains and Horus withdrew the crackling claw from the daemon’s body. Slithering black ichor dripped from the blades and squirmed into the earth around the firepit like burrower worms.
‘Did you get what you needed?’ asked Gerradon.
Horus nodded slowly, flexing his talons. ‘I believe I did, Ger, yes. Though I can’t help thinking I should have got it from you.’
Gerradon shifted uncomfortably, perhaps understanding that being summoned to Lupercal’s war tent was not the honour he might have imagined.
‘I don’t follow, my lord.’
‘Yes you do,’ said Horus. ‘As I understand it, you are brother to the Red Angel. You are both children of Erebus, one birthed on a world of blood, the other on a world of fire.’