The Unremembered Empire Part 42

*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 a.s.sa.s.sins 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. But 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.

Reals.p.a.ce tore open like a gut wound. A b.l.o.o.d.y, mangled figure tumbled out, lean limbs flailing, and left red stains on the mountain snow as he rolled down the slope. Behind him, the reals.p.a.ce tear bulged and spasmed. The torn and wet ma.s.s 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 n.o.bility.

It was just another empire for him to raze to the ground and annihilate.

He started to walk.

He left many b.l.o.o.d.y footprints in the snow behind him.

Afterword.

*I have come to the conclusion that the making of laws

is like the making of sausages a 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 ma.s.s. 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 file to include characters killed or injured in the previous volume a 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 G.o.d, 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?

And so on. That's why this book was the hardest yet, because I had to stop so often and check so much. I have tested the patience of my fellow authors and the editorial team, especially continuity guru Laurie Goulding, past the point of destruction. Their responses have never been less than generous.

But really, I don't want you knowing that, gentle reader. I'd prefer it if you didn't know it at all. If I've done my job right, there should be zero sense that this book was arduous and demanding to compose. You shouldn't be aware of the individual bricks, just the handsome aspect of the building as a whole. And if there are occasional moments when you stop, smile and think, *Wow! That was a really smart cross-reference to that other thing!' or *Crikey! I didn't expect him to turn up, but it makes great sense!' then those, my friend, are what DVD people call Easter Eggs.

So I hope this afterword hasn't in any way spoiled your enjoyment of The Unremembered Empire. And I'm definitely not going to mention how many different directions the story strands of this book will now take us in, and how much industrial grade, but mercifully secret, sausage-making that's going to require...

Dan Abnett.

Maidstone, June 2013.

Acknowledgements.

The author would like to thank the following, variously, for ground work laid down in other novels and stories, for plot threads, for brainstorming, for questions answered... and in many cases all of the above a Graham McNeill, Gav Thorpe, Jim Swallow, Aaron Dembski-Bowden, John French, Rob Sanders, Graeme Lyon, Alan Merrett, Nick Kyme, Neil Roberts, Alan Bligh and Laurie Goulding.

Thanks, love and appreciation to Nik for her supportive work editing copy, delivering feedback, and generally putting up with me and the whole process.

About the Author.

Dan Abnett is a multiple New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning comic book writer. He has written almost fifty novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt's Ghosts series, and the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies. His Horus Heresy novel Prospero Burns topped the SF charts in the UK and the US. In addition to writing for Black Library, Dan scripts audio dramas, movies, games, comics and bestselling novels for major publishers in Britain and America. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent For Eve and Rich..

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION.

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