Vengeful Spirit

by Graham McNeill

  Sons of Horus lay dead all around him, split plates and boiled meat. Yade Durso picked himself up, holding his hand as though he was in danger of losing it. Aximand saw an Interfector Warhound lying across the remains of the wall. One side was ripped away, its mechanical innards spilled and its crew a burned smear on the inner faces of its carapace.

  Bloodveil or Lochon, he couldn’t tell.

  Vapour ghosts made visibility a joke beyond forty metres. His eyes burned with the acrid fumes of melta residue. Shapes moved in the smoke. Tall, loping. Hunched low and racing through the geysers of superheated air.

  Knights. At least a dozen. Aximand struggled to remember the force disposition documents he’d read.

  Green and blue heraldry, a fire-topped mountain: House Kaushik. Arcology-dwelling House, low tech resources. Estimated six Knights maximum. Threat level: medium.

  Coiled snake icon over a field of orange and yellow. House Tazkhar, southern, steppe-dwelling nobles of noted savagery and cunning. Estimated eight Knights in total. Threat level: high.

  They came in pairs; one moving, one shooting. Heavy stubbers raked the walls and thermal cannons stabbed like bright lances through the smoke. Aximand experienced a moment of paralysis when he thought they were coming for him, but the Knights had bigger prey in mind.

  Void shield flare blazed like sheet lightning behind him as the Knights went after the remaining Warhound and the Reaver. An unequal fight, but when had that ever mattered? The Knights swept past, over the ruin of the block wall, hunting horns blaring from their carapaces.

  Then Aximand saw who was really coming for him.

  Armoured in cobalt-blue and gold, a transverse crest of white on a legate’s helmet. Bright silver blades unsheathed.

  XIII Legion.

  Ultramarines.

  The Justaerin were wasted in this fight. Nothing remained of the Imperial right flank. Ashen statues that had once been men, buried wrecks of tanks that had become inescapable ovens. Artillery positions were buried in rock, and the twisted barrels of Basilisks and Minotaurs jutted from drifts of hot ash.

  Mewling survivors begged to be pulled from avalanches of rock that were slowly cooking them to death. Abaddon didn’t give them the mercy of a bullet.

  He saw a Warlord on its knees, its lower legs fused and melted to the rock of the mountain. Its back was bent as it tried to right itself. All that was keeping it upright were its weapon arms, buried in ash to the elbows. Two Warhounds lay sprawled on their bellies, their canopies cracked open and wounded skitarii frantically digging to reach the crew.

  The Terminators killed them without breaking pace.

  The real fight was coming to them.

  The Imperator Titan was on the move.

  In the wake of the Ullanor campaign, Aximand had spoken at length to the warriors of the Ultramarines. It had been a tense time between the XVI and the XIII Legions. Together with the White Scars, the Ultramarines had acted as Lupercal’s unwitting decoy in force while the Luna Wolves struck straight to the heart of the greenskin empire.

  Neither Guilliman’s nor the Khan’s warriors took kindly to being used as bait while the glory went to others. Many fanciful stories grew out of that campaign; some aggrandising it, some belittling it, but all agreed on the spectacular nature of the victory, with Horus and the Emperor fighting back to back. Aximand wondered if that particular story would ever be retold in years to come.

  Ezekyle had been merciless in his not-so-gentle mockery of the laggardly Ultramarines.

  ‘Always late for the fight,’ Ezekyle had roared, strutting like a peacock. The challenge had come from a sword-champion named Lamiad, and Ezekyle had accepted. He had a head of height on the slender Ultramarine, but Lamiad had him on his back in under a minute.

  ‘If you must fight an Ultramarine, you have to kill him quickly,’ Lamiad warned Ezekyle. ‘If he is still alive, then you are dead.’

  Sound advice, though until now, Aximand had never realised just how sound. The Ultramarines had seen the threat of the Silence of Death and withdrawn to positions prepared for just such an eventuality. Practical, indeed.

  Now three hundred warriors in the blue of open skies came at the scattered warriors of the XVI Legion with hatred in their hearts. Aximand had somewhere in the region of four hundred, but they were scattered and spread through the ruins. At best, he had a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty immediately to hand.

  The odds favoured the Ultramarines.

  But since when had that ever mattered to the Sons of Horus.

  ‘Lupercal!’ shouted Aximand, swinging Mourn-it-all from its shoulder harness. The blade gleamed in the murder-light of battle. The runic script worked into the fuller shone with anticipation.

  The Sons of Horus rallied to the Warmaster’s name as Aximand swung his blade up to his shoulder and charged the Ultramarines. Bolter shells filled the rapidly diminishing space between them. Armour cracked open, bodies fell. Not enough to halt the tides.

  Aximand picked his target, a sergeant with a notched sword that struck him as being the very antithesis of all the XIII Legion stood for. He would be doing Primarch Guilliman a favour by killing this legionary – what sort of example was he setting his warriors?

  The ocean green and cobalt-blue slammed together in a shattering crack of plate and blades. Pistols blazed, swords crashed and armour sundered. Aximand split the Ultramarines sergeant from clavicle to pelvis with one stroke. No photonic edge was ever sharper. He backswung and hacked through a legionary’s waist. The hosts became entangled, a heaving, grunting press of armoured bodies. Too close and cramped for sword work. Aximand slammed the hilt against a warrior’s visor. It cracked and spit sparks. A pistol shot blew it out.

  Yade Durso’s sword had broken. He spun through the melee with two pistols. He took shots of opportunity, heads, spines and throats. Like a pistol master of the Scout Auxilia, he never stopped moving.

  The fight was brutal. The blue had the better of it, fighting in ordered ranks, like a living threshing machine. Their blades and guns worked tirelessly, as though the Ultramarines fought to the unheard recitation of an unseen combat master.

  It was war without heroics, without art.

  But it was winning.

  Already outnumbered, the Sons of Horus were fighting on their own, each warrior the hero in his own battle. But heroes could not win on their own, they needed battle-brothers. Aximand saw that ego had hamstrung them. They had come to Molech expecting an easy fight. It had made them forget themselves, and the XIII Legion were punishing them for that complacency.

  Aximand roared and swung Mourn-it-all in a wide arc, clearing space. Ultramarines fell back from his unnaturally keen edge.

  ‘Sons of Horus, close ranks!’ shouted Aximand. ‘Show these eastern dogs how the mongrel bastards of Cthonia fight!’

  Warriors gathered around him. Not enough to keep them from being pushed from the field, step after backward step.

  A warrior of the XIII Legion came at Aximand with a long-bladed polearm. The leaf-shaped blade shimmered with power. It gave him reach. Aximand jumped back as the golden blade stabbed for him. The warrior was a vexillary, Aximand now saw, the long-shafted weapon he bore having once borne a flag. Its burned remains hung limply from corded red fasteners.

  ‘You lost the standard,’ said Aximand. ‘You ought to impale yourself on that spike of yours.’

  ‘You will all die here,’ said the Ultramarine.

  Aximand turned the polearm aside with Mourn-it-all’s blade. He spun inside its reach. His elbow smashed the Ultramarine’s face.

  The warrior staggered, but didn’t fall. ‘If you must fight an Ultrama–’

  Aximand plunged Mourn-it-all through the vexillary’s breastplate until the quillons struck the glittering Ultima on his plastron.

  ‘I know,’ said Aximand. ‘Make sure you kill him.’

  From the fire-warmed heat of his war tent, Horus watched a hololithic representation of the battle unfolding. With each upd
ate fed into the cogitator by the kneeling ranks of calculus logi, Horus barked manoeuvre orders to Scout Auxilia runners who carried them to the vox-tents.

  Beyond the war tent, hundreds of Rhinos, Land Raiders and Thunderhawks waited to carry thousands of Sons of Horus into battle. The remaining Titans of Vulcanum, Mortis and Vulpa were spread through the legionaries. A force capable of utter destruction, but they too waited.

  Maloghurst stood at his side, but had said little since the battle’s opening shots. Horus sensed his confusion at giving battle with a full third of the army yet to engage. Horus did not explain. His reasons would become clear soon enough.

  ‘Ezekyle’s Justaerin are pushing hard for the centre,’ said Maloghurst. ‘The destruction of Iron Fist Mountain has blown the left flank wide open.’

  They’d felt the monstrous shock waves of the orbital barrage from Var Zerba like the rumblings of a distant earthquake. Fire-streaked smoke spread like embers on the horizon. It would rain ash for weeks, turning the entire agri-belt into a benighted wasteland.

  ‘Ezekyle will need support if he’s not going to be annihilated by Paragon of Terra.’

  ‘He’ll have it, Mal,’ Horus assured him.

  ‘From where, sir?’ said Maloghurst. ‘The Red Angel was supposed to drive the Blood Angels into madness, to break the centre for our Army forces to exploit. But the sons of Sanguinius are dead, and our centre has yet to make any significant impact. They’re dying in droves out there.’

  Horus gestured over the hololithic display, already knowing what he would see. The Imperial guns were decimating his Army units at the heart of the advance. The fields before the ridge line were a killing ground of burning wrecks and corpses. Thousands were dead, thousands more still would die.

  It irked Horus that the Cruor Angelus had not made good on its promise to turn the Blood Angels. Given that he had upset the schemes of Erebus to prevent that very thing on Signus, the irony was not lost on him.

  ‘And Aximand is bogged down on the right against forces from the Thirteenth Legion,’ continued Maloghurst. ‘It’s going to take a Sons of Horus speartip to get through that line. You need to deploy the rest of the Legion and Titan forces.’

  ‘Mal, are you telling me my business?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Good,’ said Horus. ‘Because I see the complexity of war differently to other men. Killing on this scale isn’t only about numbers and movement on a battlefield. Just by observing them I shape them and bend them to my will. Can you imagine any of my brothers mastering so chaotic an endeavour as war as I do?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Horus waved an admonishing finger. ‘Come on, Mal, you’re better than that. Stop sounding like a sycophant. Answer honestly.’

  Maloghurst bowed and said, ‘Perhaps Guilliman.’

  ‘Too obvious,’ said Horus. ‘Some think he has no heart for war, that all he cares about are grand plans and stratagems. They’re wrong. He knows war as well as I do, he just wishes he didn’t.’

  ‘Then perhaps Dorn?’

  ‘No, too hidebound,’ said Horus. ‘Nor the Lion or Vulkan. And not the Khan, though he and I are so very close in alignment.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘Ferrus,’ answered Horus, tapping the lid of the ornately wrought box of lacquered wood and iron that sat next to him.

  ‘If he was so capable, then why is he dead?’

  ‘I didn’t say he was perfect,’ said Horus, leaning forward as the hololith hazed with static as it updated. ‘But he knew war like no other. Terra would already be ours if he had joined us, if my Phoenician brother had handled the approach with a modicum of subtlety.’

  ‘Subtlety was never Fulgrim’s strong suit,’ said Maloghurst.

  ‘No, but that lack has played in our favour here.’

  ‘It has?’

  ‘The power Fulgrim so willingly embraced has whispered honey in the dreams of Molech’s rulers for many years,’ said Horus. ‘Those dreams are about to become reality. And when they do, trust me, Mal, you’ll be glad we kept so far away.’

  A stone lintel cracked and slammed down, blocking further progress along the trench. A firestorm raged overhead and Abaddon pressed himself flat against the vitrified stone wall as flames roared along its length. Fire was little threat to Terminator armour, but this was weaponised plasma from a Titan’s weapon.

  An Imperator Titan.

  Paragon of Terra’s guns were ripping the world apart.

  Missiles, explosive shells, hurricanes of bolter fire, laser fire and killing beams from volcano cannon. What little was left of the trenches and strongpoints of this flank were being reduced to shot-blasted powder.

  The Justaerin could survive a great deal, more than any other living thing on the battlefield, but the damned Imperator was going to kill them all. The walls of the trench blew inwards with the shock wave of another weapon system. Abaddon pushed away chunks of hot stone and metal.

  A veteran hauled Abaddon clear with his one remaining arm. The other ended at the shoulder where the pressure wave of a passing gatling shell had ripped it away. Another weapon fired overhead, something with solid rounds, though Abaddon could no longer pick one weapon’s fire from another. The overpressure of the cycling rounds battered his armour like an army of aggrieved forge-smiths.

  Everything merged into one continuous thunder of explosions, percussive hammer blows on the ground and searing thunderstorms of impossibly bright light that burned everything they touched.

  The trenches had provided some cover, but they were no match for the holocaust-level destruction an Imperator could unleash. He doubted half his warriors had survived this far. Another few minutes and they would all be dead.

  ‘What was the Warmaster thinking sending us into this?’ yelled Kibre, stumbling from a blockhouse of adamantium made soft as butter by the plasma fire. Abaddon saw the corpses of at least a dozen Justaerin within. More filled the trench system around him, but he couldn’t see them. Too many red icons to know how many were dead, how many alive.

  More dead than he’d ever thought to see among the Justaerin.

  ‘How are we supposed to get past that Imperator?’

  Abaddon had no answer for the Widowmaker, and set off down the trench. Movement was their only ally. To remain static was to die.

  More explosions shook the trenches. The ground split and vomited earth and smoke. It felt like the very bedrock of Molech was breaking apart. Abaddon half expected to see lakes of magma ooze up from the cracks in the earth. Hundreds of las-blasts roared overhead, a horizontal rain of killing light. More explosions, more fire, more detonations, more death.

  His one-armed rescuer died as three spinning pieces of rebar sliced through his chest, pinning him to the rock. Two plunged into the ground less than half a metre from Kibre. Abaddon grinned and shook his head.

  A world-shaking impact burst the walls of the trench. Fire-fused glass cracked and fell to the ground. Burned earth poured in from above. Ruptured bodies came with it, threatening to bury them alive with the men they had killed.

  ‘Now what?’ demanded Kibre, pushing along the corpse-choked trench behind Abaddon. Explosions chased them. Debris rained and the sky turned to fire.

  Abaddon paused.

  ‘That wasn’t a weapon,’ he said.

  ‘Then what in the nine hells was it?’

  ‘A footstep,’ said Abaddon. ‘It’s the Imperator. It’s coming to crush us.’

  The End Times had come to Molech. This was to be the last ride of the Stormlord, a final sally into the jaws of death. His noble vajra knights rode with him as they faced the daemon beast and the world’s ending.

  It towered over everything, a mountain-sized creature of darkness that was swallowing the world with its every breath. The black and white of its scales was only eclipsed by the fire surrounding it.

  Fire from its daemonic breath and fire from its sorcerous fists.

  It was unmaking the world, and though it would surely cos
t him his life, he knew he had to try and stop it. His steed bucked beneath him, its animal brain understandably reluctant to ride into the fire of its doom.

  He quelled it with a sharp thought.

  But on the back of that thought came another, a treacherous and unbecoming one. A mortal thought.

  This is not real, it said, this is fantasy...

  The voice grew louder until it was screaming in his skull. The Stormlord tried to shut it out, but it only grew more intense. And for a moment the towering form of the dragon wavered. Its outline blurred and Albard saw just what he was charging towards.

  Albard? Yes, Albard...

  He was the Stormlord.

  No, he was Albard Devine. Firstborn Scion of Cyprian Devine, Knight Seneschal of Molech, Imperial commander in the Imperium of Man. This was his world.

  A poison veil fell from Albard’s fevered eyes and he saw the interior of the Banelash’s canopy through the mist of his one remaining eye. He reclined in a fluid place of unnatural angles and billowing musks. Of silks and gold and gems. The interior was no longer machine-smoothed metal, but possessed the fleshy, furred texture of a pleasure palace.

  Where before he had interfaced with the Knight’s operation via the spinal implants, now his wasted body was a mass of writhing, serpentine ropes that oozed from the warped interior. Their ends were puckered with lamprey-like mouths. Tiny needle teeth buried in the meat of his limbs as they fed on him and filled his veins with their scented toxins.

  ‘No!’ screamed Albard, but laughter was his only answer.

  One brother rejects me and tries to kill me – do you think I will let another do the same?

  ‘I am Albard Devine!’ he cried, holding onto his sense of self as blissful ecstasies filled his mind with pleasure. ‘I am...’

  His protests died as the fronds caressing his limbs withdrew and he saw what he had become. Beneath the mouths of the mass of snake-like feelers, he was naked, but he was not the ravaged specimen of wretchedness he’d expected.