Garro knight of grey, p.1
Garro: Knight Of Grey, page 1
Book 1 – THE SOLAR WAR
Book 2 - THE LOST AND THE DAMNED
Book 3 - THE FIRST WALL
Book 4 - SATURNINE
Book 5 - MORTIS
Book 6 - WARHAWK
Book 7 - ECHOES OF ETERNITY
SONS OF THE SELENAR (Novella)
FURY OF MAGNUS (Novella)
GARRO: KNIGHT OF GREY (Novella)
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 – THE 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
More tales from the Horus Heresy...
PROMETHEAN SUN
AURELIAN
BROTHERHOOD OF THE STORM
THE CRIMSON FIST
CORAX: SOULFORGE
PRINCE OF CROWS
DEATH AND DEFIANCE
TALLARN: EXECUTIONER
SCORCHED EARTH
THE PURGE
THE HONOURED
THE UNBURDENED
BLADES OF THE TRAITOR
TALLARN: IRONCLAD
RAVENLORD
THE SEVENTH SERPENT
WOLF KING
CYBERNETICA
SONS OF THE FORGE
Many of these titles are also available as abridged and unabridged audiobooks. Order the full range of Horus Heresy novels and audiobooks from blacklibrary.com
Also available
MACRAGGE’S HONOUR
Dan Abnett and Neil Roberts
Audio Dramas
THE DARK KING / THE LIGHTNING TOWER
RAVEN’S FLIGHT
GARRO: OATH OF MOMENT
GARRO: LEGION OF ONE
BUTCHER’S NAILS
GREY ANGEL
GARRO: BURDEN OF DUTY
GARRO: SWORD OF TRUTH
THE SIGILLITE
HONOUR TO THE DEAD
CENSURE
WOLF HUNT
HUNTER’S MOON
THIEF OF REVELATIONS
TEMPLAR
ECHOES OF RUIN
MASTER OF THE FIRST
THE LONG NIGHT
THE EAGLE’S TALON
IRON CORPSES
RAPTOR
GREY TALON
THE EITHER
THE HEART OF THE PHAROS / CHILDREN OF SICARUS
RED-MARKED
ECHOES OF IMPERIUM
ECHOES OF REVELATION
THE THIRTEENTH WOLF
VIRTUES OF THE SONS / SINS OF THE FATHER
THE BINARY SUCCESSION
DARK COMPLIANCE
BLACKSHIELDS: THE FALSE WAR
BLACKSHIELDS: THE RED FIEF
HUBRIS OF MONARCHIA
NIGHTFANE
BLACKSHIELDS: THE BROKEN CHAIN
Download the full range of Horus Heresy audio dramas from blacklibrary.com
Contents
Cover
Backlist
The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra
Garro: Knight of Grey
Dramatis Personae
Quotes
One
Two
Interval I
Three
Four
Interval II
Five
Six
Afterword
Acknowledgements
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Mortarion: The Pale King’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
It is a time of legend.
The galaxy is in flames. The Emperor’s glorious vision for humanity is in ruins. His favoured son, Horus, has turned from his father’s light and embraced Chaos.
His armies, the mighty and redoubtable Space Marines, are locked in a brutal civil war. Once, these ultimate warriors fought side by side as brothers, protecting the galaxy and bringing mankind back into the Emperor’s light. Now they are divided.
Some remain loyal to the Emperor, whilst others have sided with the Warmaster. Pre-eminent amongst them, the leaders of their thousands-strong Legions, are the primarchs. Magnificent, superhuman beings, they are the crowning achievement of the Emperor’s genetic science. Thrust into battle against one another, victory is uncertain for either side.
Worlds are burning. At Isstvan V, Horus dealt a vicious blow and three loyal Legions were all but destroyed. War was begun, a conflict that will engulf all mankind in fire. Treachery and betrayal have usurped honour and nobility. Assassins lurk in every shadow. Armies are gathering. All must choose a side or die.
Horus musters his armada, Terra itself the object of his wrath. Seated upon the Golden Throne, the Emperor waits for his wayward son to return. But his true enemy is Chaos, a primordial force that seeks to enslave mankind to its capricious whims.
The screams of the innocent, the pleas of the righteous resound to the cruel laughter of Dark Gods. Suffering and damnation await all should the Emperor fail and the war be lost.
The end is here. The skies darken, colossal armies gather.
For the fate of the Throneworld, for the fate of mankind itself...
The Siege of Terra has begun.
For Danie, and all the others who made it worthwhile.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The Knights Errant
Nathaniel Garro – Former Agentia Primus, former battle-captain of the Death Guard
Helig Gallor – Former legionary of the Death Guard
The XIV Legion, ‘Death Guard’
Mortarion – Primarch
Typhus, the Traveller – First Captain
The Imperial Army
Maed Kostagar – Captain, Dilectio Tier, Marmax garrison
Rold Greff – Trooper, Dilectio Tier, Marmax garrison
Others
Euphrati Keeler – The Living Saint, former remembrancer
‘Those who embrace their own fate fear nothing.’
– Last Books of Sight, Hirundus Iago [date unknown]
‘There must come a moment when the soul knows: this far, and no further. But we are cursed never to hear that warning until it is too late.’
– attributed to the remembrancer Ignace Karkasy [M31]
ONE
Dining on Ashes
The Last of the Few
You Know Her
With one heavy footfall after another, the warrior giant advanced up the narrow spiral stairwell.
His ceramite boots were too wide for stairs that had been built for the tread of common men, the shoulders of his power armour far too broad for the tight, human-scale confines of the towering minaret. The edges of his wargear’s pauldrons would catch on the walls from time to time, gouging lines out of the fire-blackened granite to mark his passing.
He was forced to negotiate places where the sides of the passageway had been blown in by shell impacts, picking his way over heaps of sooty debris, and often, the grisly remains of slain defenders.
The damage and the carnage grew ever worse the closer he got to the top. The tower had been home to a lascannon nest that rained beams of crimson hell down on the enemy throughout the night’
The dead – men and women in the grey carapace armour of the resident garrison – lay where they had fallen, half-buried in drifts of ash and broken brickwork. Some still clutched their guns to them, the muzzles of the rifles glistening with the oily rainbow sheen of heat-damaged metal. He saw burst flesh seared from within marking many of the soldiers, and toxin-bloated faces on others that stared sightlessly at the sky. Death had touched them with terror and agony in their final moments.
Compelled by a sudden impulse, the warrior checked his air sensors, then removed his grey-hued battle helmet and mag-locked it to his hip. He looked up past the missing roof of the tower, to snatch a glimpse of what the fallen had seen.
Above, the forbidding sky had a strange, sickly hue, lined with striations of black cloud reaching from north to south, and on the wind were sounds that might have been voices, if one listened for them. Hundreds of metres up, above the perimeter of the great aegis field, metal birds caught the weak sunlight as they wheeled and turned around one another, trading streaks of sun-hot plasma from their guns. The keening whine of their engines and the faint chug of their weapons reached him over another, steady sound coming from far away – a low drumming like the beating of a gigantic heart.
Past the atmo-fighters locked in their endless dogfight, the strange storms of brassy lightning, and up into the higher ranges of the reddish Himalazian sky, shapes loomed in the heavens. Great baroque forms floating in near-orbit, some on fire, others crackling with arcane energies. Starships as big as city-states drifted there, their numbers and their masses so great that their proximity tormented the planet’s gravitational and magnetic fields, warping weather patterns from pole to pole.
The skies of Terra were no longer the domain of the Imperium of Man, the warrior reflected. The skies belonged to Horus Lupercal, may his name be blighted, to the treacherous Warmaster and the Traitor Legions at his banner. Only the stone and the mud were held by those who remained loyal to the Emperor, and even those elements were in danger of slipping away.
After a breath, the warrior took another step, moving onto an unsteady outcropping of broken masonry and laser-scarred ouslite. He let his gaze drop to the riven battleground beneath the minaret, and the fields of destruction rolling away to the broken horizon.
The spindly tower was the only one to have survived the recent onslaught, emerging from the cracked and shattered domains of the gigantic Colossi Bastion, reaching to the burnt sky like a skeletal, accusing finger atop a beheaded mountain. A vast, seemingly endless landscape of rubble stretched towards the gutted shell of the bastion’s sibling fortress, Corbenic Gard, and in the direction of the City of Sight. Ahead of the warrior, the Anterior Gate and the outer dominions of the great Imperial Palace still stood intact, but in the eerie red corpse-light, the huge, maze-like conurbations resembled forms scrimshawed out of old bone.
His face turned towards the heartbeat sound, towards the Lion’s Gate and what lay past it. Eyes narrowing, he raised a battered monocular scope to look across the great distance, searching the canyons of debris and the towering wall of thick, abyssal smoke obscuring much of the battle zone’s reaches.
He picked out forms in bright crimson moving in packs through the destruction: some on foot, others riding slab-shaped tanks or speeders blurred by anti-gravity fields as they navigated the shattered avenues choked by the spill of ruined buildings. All were drawing back, likely towards more adequately reinforced strongpoints, abandoning the kill boxes and poisoned quadrants that remained from their last engagement.
These were the rearguard elements of Brother-Captain Raldoron’s forces, sons of the IX Legion, the noble Blood Angels of Sanguinius. In the past desperate hours, Raldoron’s army, and that of the White Scars Legion under the command of the Khan himself, had made war on Horus’ invaders. It had been a brutal and harrowing skirmish in a conflict that daily set new standards in horror and destruction – and ultimately, it had counted for little. The line the Blood Angels and the White Scars had fought so hard to maintain could not hold indefinitely.
The word had finally been given. The eastern bastions could no longer be adequately secured by the loyalist forces, and they were declared indefensible, surrendered in the face of the enemy advance.
The enemy.
How those words burned in the warrior’s heart.
Once, in what seemed like another life, a whole other existence, he had marched alongside those whom the Blood Angels and White Scars had fought to a standstill. In the time before the great betrayal at Isstvan, in countless righteous battles and noble crusades, the warrior had been proud to be a part of the XIV Legion, the Death Guard. Now he had only shame, sorrow and rage for those who had once been his oathsworn brethren. Their broken vows to Terra and the Emperor were wounds upon his heart that would never heal, and that he could never forgive.
He looked past the withdrawing Blood Angels elements – the sole loyalist forces remaining on the field, the White Scars having already decamped and moved off in search of better odds – and away to the wall of curdled smoke marking the edge of the traitors’ advance.
It wasn’t just smoke. One who studied it carefully would see that the hazy mass moved against the direction of the wind, with apparent conscious intent. Even from kilometres away, he saw the glitter of reflected light off the millions of tiny wings that made up the plague swarms.
And among the haze strode huge forms as tall as hab-blocks, unhurried and inexorable, moving as one in deliberate lockstep. Each massive footfall sounded across the distance to the warrior’s ears, the steady drumbeat rhythm of corrupted steel and corroded iron against the earth.
The giant bipedal war machines of the Legio Mortis were on the march, each passing moment bringing them ever nearer to the walls of the Inner Palace. Within hours, they would be within optimal range and a new rain of fire would begin. Oath-breakers of the Mechanicum, bound to Horus’ perfidy, the Warlords, Reavers and Iconoclasts of the Death’s Heads would leave only radioactive dust in their wake. Somewhere at the feet of those killer god-machines marched phalanx upon phalanx of tainted Death Guard legionaries, and the warped things they had allied with.
His brothers were coming for him, he could feel it in his blood and bone. They were coming for them all.
In every corner of the Palace’s gigantic span, a thousand small battles were being fought, with countless battalions of soldiers, aviators, gunners, war devices and legionaries deep in their own brutal engagements. Whole districts had been laid waste, filled with the bodies of unburied dead left to decay and fester by comrades who had no time to tend to the innumerable fallen. The pall of the worst war this planet had ever known hung over everything, the dense reek of aerosolised vitae, spent promethium and cordite changing the atmosphere into a constant funereal haze. It was no exaggeration to voice the thought – these desperate times had the colour of the end of days, of an apocalypse that would, in its fullness, soon erase the rule of mankind from the planet of its origin.
No living soul on Terra could ignore the whispers in every shadow, and the terrors – some conjured by tricks of the mind, others real in fang and talon – lurking in the darkness. There could be no rest, no respite, no quarter asked for or given. Hell had disgorged itself upon the planet, rising from the depths of nightmares and falling from the blackness between the stars. Whole worlds were ending here in every passing second, some of them the lives of ordinary men, others the futures of those who would be left behind.
And yet… in this place, in this moment, there was only desolation. In this lacuna amid the bloodshed, the sullen peace of the grave held sway.
A new sound caught the warrior’s attention, a trickle of stone fragments and the juddering buzz of damaged motors as something moved beneath one of the rubble piles. Warily, he crossed the open space to the source of the noise, and with one gauntleted hand, he shoved away a fallen piece of ceiling. The action revealed the remains of two bodies, Army troopers most likely assigned to the lascannon crew. They had fallen together, united in death, but what killed them was still here.
A foetid, bloated shape trembled in the daylight, nestled between the bodies of the dead men. No larger than a fuel barrel, it lay atop the corpses. On one surface, a cluster of insect eyes regarded the warrior blankly, and two filth-caked propeller modules protruded from its flanks, blades turning in weak, jerky motions. A cluster of chitinous mandibles scraped and wavered in the air.
