Vengeful Spirit

by Graham McNeill

  The cave corkscrewed into the mountain for perhaps a hundred metres, lousy with distorted echoes and strangely reflected light. As tall as a processional on a starship, the passage shimmered with rainwater seeping through microscopic cracks in the rock. The shifting beams caught falling droplets and shimmering rainbows arced between the walls.

  They paused as the low, wet growl of something large and hungry was carried from deeper in the tunnels. Territorial threat noise.

  ‘Whatever that is, we should leave it alone,’ said Kibre.

  ‘For once I’m in total agreement with you, Falkus,’ said Noctua.

  ‘No,’ said Horus. ‘We go on.’

  ‘I knew you were going to say that,’ said Abaddon.

  ‘And if we run into whatever that is?’ asked Aximand.

  ‘We kill it.’

  The Mournival drew closer to Horus, each with a bladed weapon and firearm drawn. Moisture drizzled the air. It pattered on armour plates and hissed on powered blade edges.

  ‘You know what it is, don’t you?’ said Aximand.

  ‘No,’ said Horus. ‘I don’t.’

  The sounds of animal breath rasping over dripping fangs came again. It drew Horus on even as some primal part of his brain told him that whatever lurked in the darkness beneath the mountain was something not even he could defeat.

  The thought was so alien that he stopped in his tracks.

  The intrusion to his psyche was so subtle that only a thought so incongruous to his self-image revealed its presence. It didn’t feel like an attack though, more an innate property of the cave.

  Or a side effect of whatever had happened here.

  Horus pressed on, the passageway eventually widening into a rugged cavern thick with dripping stalactites and blade-like stalagmites. Some ran together in oddly conjoined columns, wet and glistening like malformed bones or mutant sinews.

  A stagnant lake filled the centre of the cavern, its surface a basalt mirror. Rotted vegetation, festering dung and heaps of bone taller than a man were heaped at the water’s edge. The ambient temperature dropped by several degrees, and plumes of breath feathered before the Warmaster and his sons.

  Horus’s skin tingled at the presence of something achingly familiar yet wholly unknown. He’d felt something similar at the base of the lightning-struck tower, but this was different. Stronger. More intense. As though his father were standing just out of sight, hidden in the depths and watching. Shadows stretched and slithered as the beams of the Justaerin’s lamps swept around the chamber.

  ‘I have been here before,’ he said, removing his helmet and hooking it to his belt.

  ‘You remember this cavern?’ said Aximand as the Mournival and Justaerin spread out.

  ‘No, but every fibre of my body tells me I stood here,’ said Horus, moving through the chamber.

  Light refracting through the translucent columns and crystalline growths imparted colour to the walls: bilious green, cancerous purple, bruise yellow. They were standing in the guts of the mountain. Literally. A chamber of digestion. A suitlight played over the lake, holding steady enough for Horus to picture it as a low-hanging moon.

  Not Molech’s moon, but Terra’s moon, as though the lake wasn’t a body of water at all, but a window through time. He’d sat with his father on the shores of the Tuz Gölü and skimmed rocks at the image of the moon and for a moment – just a fleeting moment – he could smell its hypersaline waters.

  The light moved on and the water was just water. Cold and hostile, but just water.

  With a growing sense of purpose, Horus made his way towards the water’s edge. Shadows where no shadows ought to be stretched over the walls, and a thousand muttering voices seemed to rise from the water. He glanced back at the Mournival. Could they hear the voices or see the shadows? He doubted it.

  This cave was not entirely of this world, and whatever was keeping it anchored was fraying. Just by being here he was tugging on its loose threads. The image of bones and sinews returned, something organic, the architecture of the mind.

  ‘That’s what you did here,’ he said, turning on the spot. ‘You cut through the world here and reshaped us, made us forget what we’d seen you do…’

  ‘Sir?’ said Aximand.

  Horus nodded to himself. ‘This is the scab you left behind, father. Something this powerful leaves a mark, and this is it. The bruise you left behind when you shaped your lie.’

  The frayed edge pulled a little more. The scab peeled back.

  Ghost shapes moved through the cavern, given life by his picking at the wound in the angles of space and time. Each was numinous and smudged, like figures seen through dirty glass. They were indistinct, but Horus knew them all.

  He walked among them, smiling as though his brothers were here with him now.

  ‘The Khan stood here,’ said Horus as the first figure stopped and took a knee on his left. A second figure knelt to his right.

  ‘The Lion over there.’

  Horus felt himself enveloped in light, cocooned by its cold illumination. He’d retraced the steps he’d taken almost a century ago without even knowing it.

  Horus moved back, detaching from a rendering of his own body in ambient light. Like his spectral primarch brothers, his radiant doppelgänger knelt as a figure approached from across the lake. Gold fire and caged lightning; the Emperor without His mask.

  ‘What is this?’ demanded Abaddon, his bolter raised and ready to fire. The figures were only now becoming visible to them. Horus waved their weapons down.

  ‘An imprint left over from days past,’ he said. ‘A psychic figment of a shared consciousness.’

  The ghost of his father walked over the surface of the lake, wordlessly repeating whatever psycho-cognitive alchemy he had wrought to reshape the pathways in the minds of his sons.

  ‘This is where I forgot Molech,’ said Horus. ‘Maybe here is where I will remember it.’

  Aximand raised his bolter again, aiming it at the numinous being on the water. ‘You said that thing is an echo? A psychic imprint?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Horus.

  ‘Then why is it boiling the lake?’

  The chirurgeon’s metallic fingers trembled as they applied yet another flesh-graft to Raeven’s right arm. The skin from pectorals to wrist was pink and new like a newborn’s. The pain was intense, but Raeven now knew that physical suffering was the easiest pain to endure.

  Edoraki Hakon’s death meant the task of keeping the thousands of soldiers who’d escaped Avadon alive had fallen to him. Legio Fortidus had won the retreating Imperial forces a chance to properly regroup in the wooded vales of the agri-belt. With luck and a fair wind, they should link with forward elements of Tyana Kourion’s Grand Army of Molech outside Lupercalia in two days.

  Coordinating a military retreat was hard enough, but Raeven also had to deal with an ever-growing civilian component. Refugees were streaming in from the north and east. From Larsa, Hvithia, Leosta and Luthre. From every agri-collective, moisture-farm and livestock commercia.

  Borne in an armada of groundcars, cargo carriers and whatever motive transport could be found, tens of thousands of terrorised people had been drawn to Raeven’s ragamuffin host.

  He’d welcomed the burden, the role so consuming it kept him from dwelling on the loss of his sons. But with the threat of immediate destruction lifted, Raeven’s thoughts turned inwards.

  Tears flowed and grief-fuelled rages had seen a dozen aides beaten half to death. A hole had opened inside him, a void that he only now recognised had been filled by his sons.

  He’d never known joy to compare to Egelic’s birth, and Osgar’s arrival had been no less wonderful. Even Cyprian cracked a smile, the old bastard finally pleased with something Raeven had done.

  Banan had struggled to enter the world. Birth complications had almost killed him and his mother, but the boy had lived, though he had ever been a brooding presence in the feast halls. Hard to like, but with a rebellious streak Raeven couldn’t help but
admire. Looking at Banan was like looking in a mirror.

  Only Osgar now remained, a boy who’d displayed no aptitude or appetite for knightly ways. Against his better judgement, Raeven had allowed the boy to follow Lyx into the Serpent Cult.

  The chirurgeon finished his work and Raevan looked down at the crimson, oxygenated flesh of his arm. He nodded, dismissing the man, who gratefully retreated from Raeven’s silver-skinned pavilion. Other chirurgeons had been less fortunate.

  Raeven rose from the folding camp-seat and poured a large goblet of Caeban wine. His movements were stiff, the new flesh and reset bones of his chest still fragile. Banelash had been badly damaged, and the repercussions of the Knight’s hurt were borne by his body.

  He swallowed the wine in one gulp to dull the ache in his side. He poured another. The pain in his side dimmed, but he’d need a lot more to dull the pain in his heart.

  ‘Is that wise?’ said Lyx, sweeping into the tent. She’d arrived from Lupercalia that morning, resplendent in a crimson gown with brass and mother-of-pearl panels.

  ‘My sons are dead,’ snapped Raeven. ‘And I’m going to have a drink. Lots of drink in fact.’

  ‘These soldiers are looking to their Imperial commander for leadership,’ said Lyx. ‘How will it look if you tour the camp stumbling around like a drunk.’

  ‘Tour the camp?’

  ‘These men and women need to see you,’ said Lyx, moving close and pushing the wine jug back to the table. ‘You need to show them that House Devine stands with them so that they will stand with you when it matters most.’

  ‘House Devine?’ grunted Raeven. ‘There practically isn’t a House Devine anymore. The bastard killed Egelic and Banan, or didn’t you hear me tell you that when you got here?’

  ‘I heard you,’ said Lyx.

  ‘Really? I just wanted to be sure,’ snapped Raeven, turning and throwing his goblet across the pavilion. ‘Because for all it seemed to affect you, I might as well have been talking about a particularly good crap I’d had.’

  ‘Horus slew them himself?’

  ‘Don’t say that name!’ roared Raeven, wrapping a hand around Lyx’s neck and squeezing. ‘I don’t want to hear it!’

  Lyx fought against him, but he was too strong and too enraged with grief. Her face crumpled and turned a livid shade of purple as he squeezed the life out of her. He’d always thought of her as fundamentally ugly, even if her outward appearance suggested otherwise. She was broken inside, and the thought sent a spasm of loathing through him. He was just as broken as her.

  Perhaps they both deserved to die.

  Maybe so, but she’d go first.

  ‘My sons were to be my immortality,’ he said, almost spitting in her face as he pushed her back against the pavilion wall. ‘My legacy was to be the honourable continuance of House Devine, but the bastard Warmaster has put paid to that dream. My sons’ armour rusts on Avadon’s beach, and their bodies lie rotted and unclaimed. Food for scavenger birds.’

  He felt something sharp at his groin and looked down to see a hooked naga fang pressed against his inner thigh.

  ‘I’ll slice your balls off,’ said Lyx, pressing the needle-sharp point hard against his leg. ‘I’ll open your femoral artery from your crotch to your knee. You’ll empty in thirty seconds.’

  Raeven grinned and released her, stepping away from his sister-wife with a grunt of amusement. Colour returned to her face and he was sure that the excitement he saw in her eyes was mirrored in his own.

  ‘Cut my balls off and House Devine really is finished,’ he said.

  ‘A figure of speech,’ said Lyx, massaging her bruised throat.

  ‘Anyway, your womb will be as barren as the Tazkhar steppe by now,’ said Raeven as Lyx poured them both a drink.

  He shook his head and took the goblet she offered him. ‘We make a pair don’t we, sister dearest?’

  ‘We are what our mother made us,’ replied Lyx.

  He nodded. ‘So much for your talk of turning the tide.’

  ‘Nothing has changed,’ said Lyx, putting a hand out to stroke the pink flesh of his neck. He flinched at her touch. ‘We still have Osgar, and he knows full well the importance of the continuance of the House name.’

  ‘Shargali-Shi is more of a father to that boy,’ said Raeven, only now understanding what a mistake it had been to allow him anywhere near the Serpent Cult. ‘And from what I hear, he has no interest in taking just one consort nor becoming father to a child. He won’t be the one to keep the Devine name alive.’

  ‘He doesn’t have to be a father, so long as he puts a child in the belly of a suitably pliant consort,’ said Lyx. ‘But that’s a talk for when this war is concluded.’

  Raeven nodded and accepted more wine. He felt a calming fuzziness at the edges of his perception. Wine and pain-balming chems were a heady mixture. He struggled to remember what they’d been talking about before their lover’s tiff.

  ‘So do you think I’m still the one whose actions will turn the tide of this war?’

  ‘If anything, I’m even more certain of it,’ said Lyx.

  ‘Another vision?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I saw Banelash in the heart of the great battle for Molech. In the shadow of Iron Fist Mountain. The tread of war gods shakes the earth. Flames surround the Knights of Molech. Death and blood breaks upon Banelash in a red tide and you fight like the Stormlord himself.’

  Lyx’s eyes misted over, cloudy with psychic cataracts.

  ‘A battle to end all battles rages around your Knight, yet no blade, no shell, no enemy can lay it low. And when the appointed hour comes, the mightiest god on the field is slain. Its fall is a rallying cry, and all about scream the Devine name!’

  The opaqueness of Lyx’s eyes faded and she smiled, as though a great revelation had just been revealed to her.

  ‘It’s here,’ she said, breathless with excitement.

  ‘What is?’ said Raeven, as the air turned chill.

  ‘The White Naga.’

  ‘It’s here? Now?’

  Lyx nodded, turning around as though expecting to see the avatar of the Serpent Cult within Raeven’s pavilion.

  ‘The blood sacrifice made at Avadon has brought its divine presence into the realms of men,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘The deaths of our sons has earned you the right to speak with it.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In the forest,’ said Lyx.

  Raeven snorted at the vagueness of her reply. ‘Can you be more specific? How do I find it?’

  Lyx shook her head. ‘Ride Banelash into the forest, and the White Naga will find you.’

  It moved faster than anything Horus had ever known.

  Faster than an eldar blade-lord, faster than the megarachnids of Murder, faster than thought. Its body was mist and light, sound and fury.

  A Justaerin was the first to die, his body split down the middle as though he’d run full tilt into a bandsaw. His body emptied of blood and organs in a heartbeat.

  Horus moved before anyone else, slashing his taloned gauntlet at the glittering light. His claws cut empty air and a golden fist slammed into his stomach. Doubled over, he saw Aximand shooting. The Widowmaker hunted for a target.

  Noctua was down on one knee, clutching his chest. Abaddon ran to his side, a long-bladed sword held low. Stuttering muzzle flare lit the cavern in strobing bursts. Suit lights swayed and danced. Hard volleys of mass-reactives shattered crystalline growths, blew out fist-sized lumps of calcified stone. The Justaerin moved to interpose themselves between their attacker and the Warmaster.

  Noctua fired from his knees. Kibre added his combi-bolters to the sweeping barrage, not aiming, just firing.

  They hit nothing.

  The cavern was suddenly gloriously illuminated. An angel of fire, with swords of lightning held outstretched. Faceless, remorseless, Horus recognised it for what it was. A sentinel creature, a final psychic trap emplaced by the Emperor to destroy th
ose who sought to unpick the secrets of His past.

  Horus could barely fix on the beast.

  Its radiance was so fierce, so blinding. Its swords unleashed forking blasts of lightning, and Aximand was hurled across the cavern. His smoking body slammed into a wall. Stone and armour split. Horus knew the impact trauma was enough to break his spine.

  Coruscating blue swords lashed out like whips. Abaddon dived to the side, his pauldron sheared clean away. A portion of the First Captain’s shoulder remained inside, and bright blood sheeted his arm. One of the Justaerin took a step towards his downed captain before remembering his place.

  The creature turned its gaze upon the Terminator. The warrior staggered. The combi-bolter fell from his grip as he struggled to tear off his helmet. His screams over the vox were agonised. Liquid light writhed in the joints of his armour, spilling out in blistering streams of white-green fire.

  Horus shucked his taloned gauntlet, slamming shells into the breech of the inbuilt bolters. He often spoke of the murder-haruspex of Cthonia that led him to the weapon in an arming chamber of a long-dead warlord. That wasn’t entirely accurate, but the truth was for Horus alone. The gauntlet’s baroque craftsmanship was unmatched, and though Horus had been little more than a callow youth at the time, the gauntlet fitted his blood-scabbed hand as though fashioned just for him.

  A two metre tongue of flame blazed from the weapon. The recoil was savage, but Urtzi Malevolus had built his armour well and suspensor compensators kept it on target. Scads of light flew from the angel like molten steel. Torn from its body, its essence dimmed, dissolution turning it to vapour in seconds.

  It shrieked and the air between it and Horus buckled with concussive force. The last Justaerin flew apart, shattering like an assembly diagram of something vastly complex. His skeleton and internal biology atomised in a flash burn of intense light.

  Horus flew back, as though lifted by a hurricane. He came down hard in the water, its freezing temperature ramming the breath from him with an explosive fist. His mouth filled with black water. Throat muscles reacted instantly to seal his lungs and shift breathing to secondary respiratory organs.