Vengeful Spirit

by Graham McNeill

  Alivia breathed deeply, picturing Vivyen and Miska. Even Jeph, with his sad, hangdog eyes and absurd belief that he had to protect her. She missed them, and hoped Molech’s Enlightenment was already accelerating towards the system’s Mandeville point.

  No, that wasn’t helping. She needed something more, something cherished. She remembered when the auspex of a trans-loader from Ophir had failed and it ran into a submerged mine in Larsa’s harbour. She hadn’t been on the ship, but had seen it go down with all hands. Only when she returned home did she find out that Vivyen and Miska thought she’d been aboard, and they’d wept for hours believing that she was dead.

  She remembered her arms wrapped around them both when they finally succumbed to sleep. Their warm breath and the smell of their hair reminded Alivia of a time long gone, of a life now ended, when she’d been blissfully ignorant of her true nature and the doom approaching Arcadia.

  She had been happy then, and she used that to push down the violent thoughts intruding on her psyche. Alivia pictured the symbols she’d been shown: precise arrangements of intersecting lines that couldn’t possibly intersect; curves that broke every established rule of calculus; the geometry of the insane.

  She spoke the words that weren’t words, pouring every inch of her desire to see this gate sealed into what she was doing. Her hands described the motions she pictured, moving across the surface of the smooth black barrier.

  It looked and felt like a solid barrier, but it wasn’t.

  It was a scab over a hole that should never have been torn open, an impossible object that existed in an infinite number of possible existences. It was neither real nor unreal.

  A doorway to hell Alivia now attempted to unmake.

  Her surroundings faded to grey, a monochrome facsimile of the world where she was the only splash of colour. She heard gunfire, screams of pain and explosions. All were muted and dulled, as though coming from a distant battlefield.

  Her hands were radiant, leaving echoes of warp light in their wake. A pattern began to emerge, disjointed knowledge seeded throughout her psyche coming together in a multi-dimensional lattice that was part unbreakable seal, part demo charge.

  She smiled, seeing the cunning that had gone into its design, the care it had taken to hide within her. So intricate was its construction, she almost didn’t mind being used like this.

  She certainly didn’t mind that its completion would kill her.

  A spray of blood drenched Alivia and she cried out as one of her protectors dropped with a hole blown through the cobalt-blue of his breastplate. A concussive pressure wave hit her and slammed her to the ground. A spinning fragment of hot metal sliced across her shoulder. Pain blazed as blood ran down her back.

  Her surroundings bled back into her awareness. The noise, the fear and the choking clouds of smoke. She heard heavy footfalls, all thudding in unison. Short, tramping steps and the scrape of iron on stone. Alivia rolled onto her side, blinking away tears of pain from her shoulder.

  The elite Justaerin Terminators advance

  Her left arm felt useless and the stink of burned meat filled her senses. Valance lay on his back next to her. He’d taken the brunt of the blast that had knocked her to the ground. What was left of him was only recognisable by the half of his head that remained.

  She looked up in time to see a ridged line of interlocking shields barge its way into the chamber. Sons of Horus with breacher’s shields. The Ultramarines couldn’t hope to hold their position, scattered by the missile explosions and overwhelmed by suppressive volleys.

  Concentrated bursts of fire took them down in twos and threes.

  The shield line widened as the chamber opened up. Sons of Horus warriors following behind pushed the line out and brought yet more guns to bear.

  Arcadon Kyro put a hole in the shield line with coordinated blasts from the plasma one-shots on his mechanised arms. Each bolt impacted at precisely the same time, and blew apart one of the shields and the warrior behind it.

  Massed bolter fire brought him down, a ridiculous amount of overkill that shredded his flesh unrecognisable and thoroughly dismantled his mechanical augmentations. Didacus Theron and Castor Alcade pushed into the gap Kyro had opened, looking to tear it wider.

  Theron’s power sword cleaved through a shield and the arm holding it. His bolt pistol fired point-blank into the face of a Terminator. Such hulking war-monstrosities all but eliminated the need for mortal flesh entirely. The bolts detonated on impact, but left the warrior beneath unharmed.

  The Terminator’s crackling energy-fist pistoned out and rammed through the centurion’s body. He came apart in an explosion of disembodied limbs and shattered plate.

  Alivia tried to drag herself back to the gate, pushing along the floor on her backside with her heels.

  Her work was almost done. Just a little more and her obligation would be over. No more long, wearying years, no more lies and isolation. No more anything.

  A towering figure broke free of the shield line.

  A giant, a demigod, a beautiful avatar of all that humanity could achieve in greatness. She’d heard all these epithets and more used to describe the Warmaster, but they’d been coined by those viewing him at peace.

  Seeing him in battle was something entirely different.

  Horus Lupercal was a monster. A daemon of war and ruin made flesh. He was a destroyer, an unmaker and the face of all humanity ought to have turned its back on millennia ago.

  His was the face of uttermost evil...

  And he didn’t even know it.

  It was the worst thing Alivia had ever seen.

  Castor Alcade vaulted away from the Terminator bearing down on him and ran to put himself between her and the Warmaster. There was no way Alcade could defeat the Warmaster, no hope of even a fair contest.

  Alcade was dead the moment he moved, but he did it anyway.

  It was the best thing Alivia had ever seen.

  The legate of the XIII Legion thrust with his gladius.

  It snapped on the amber eye at Horus’s breast.

  The Warmaster’s titanic maul swept out and Castor Alcade was obliterated as though he had never existed.

  Alivia pushed onto her feet and threw herself at the gate, her hands slippery with blood. She traced the final lines and opened her mouth to speak the last of the apotropaic words.

  All that came out was a scream of pain.

  Alivia looked down and saw four parallel blades jutting from her chest. They pinned her to the black wall and her blood ran down the blades and into the gate.

  ‘I don’t know who you are, but I need that open,’ said the Warmaster.

  ‘Please,’ said Alivia as the pain finally caught up to her.

  Horus snapped the talons of his gauntlet from Alivia’s body. She fell, and it felt like she fell for a very long time before she hit the floor.

  She looked up into the Warmaster’s face.

  She saw no pity, no mercy. But, curiously, she saw regret.

  Alivia struggled to speak, and the Warmaster knelt to hear her valediction as the life bled out of her.

  ‘Even... souls ensnared by evil... maintain a small... bridgehead of good,’ she said. ‘I want... you... to remember that. At the end.’

  Horus looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled. And for a moment, Alivia forgot that he was the enemy of humanity.

  ‘You shouldn’t put your faith in saints, mamzel,’ said Horus.

  Alivia didn’t reply, looking over the Warmaster’s shoulder.

  The gateway of black obsidian was bleeding.

  Horus stood from the body of the dead woman.

  He wished she hadn’t died so he could ask her how she had come to be here. But she had stood against him and tried to stop him from achieving his destiny. And that was a death sentence.

  ‘Who was she?’ asked Mortarion.

  ‘I don’t know, but I felt the touch of father upon her.’

  ‘She met Him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hor
us, ‘but a long time ago I think.’

  Mortarion looked up at the gate, clearly unimpressed. Horus saw his brother’s expression and put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t underestimate what our father did here,’ said Horus. ‘He broke through into another realm, a realm no other being has breached and lived. Such a journey would make the climb to your first father’s hall seem like a pleasant stroll.’

  Mortarion shrugged. ‘I don’t much care what He did,’ he said. He tapped the butt of Silence against the body of the woman. ‘She was here to seal the gate. Do you think she succeeded?’

  Horus reached out and laid his palm flat against the black wall. He felt micro-tremors in its surface, too faint to be perceived by anyone save a primarch.

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ said Horus, unsnapping the seals across his breastplate. ‘Take that reaper of yours and cut me.’

  ‘Cut you?’

  Horus shed his armour, letting each plate fall to the ground until he stood clad only in a grey bodysuit.

  ‘I was told this gate can only open in blood,’ said Horus. ‘So cut me and don’t spare the edge.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Kibre coming forward. ‘Don’t. Let one of us do it. Spill my blood, use as much as it takes, even if it kills me.’

  Little Horus and Ezekyle joined their voices in opposition to his desire for Mortarion to cut him deep.

  Horus folded his arms and said, ‘Thank you, my sons, but if I’ve learned anything from Lorgar, it’s that somebody else’s blood won’t do for something like this. It has to be mine.’

  ‘Then let’s get this done,’ said Mortarion, hefting Silence and readying its blade. Where some of Horus’s brothers might balk at the thought of wounding him, Mortarion had no such qualms. If his brother sought to usurp him, this was his chance.

  Horus locked his gaze with his brother.

  ‘Do it.’

  Mortarion spun Silence around his body.

  The blade flashed.

  Horus howled as the Death Lord’s reaper cut him from clavicle to pelvis. The pain was ferocious. Its savagery took him all the way back to Davin’s moon, and Eugan Temba’s stolen blade.

  Blood jetted from the wound and sprayed the black wall.

  Through eyes wet with pain, Horus saw unfinished sigils and arrangements of arcane significance. Their brightness was dying, washed away by the tide of his blood.

  The gouges his talons had torn were bleeding.

  His blood and the woman’s mingled, and Horus saw hair-fine cracks spreading from where he’d marked the wall.

  He grinned through the pain. Worldbreaker swung to his shoulder.

  ‘Time to earn your name,’ he said.

  The Emperor’s gift swung round in a sledgehammer arc.

  And smashed the wall to shards.

  Absolute darkness spilled into the chamber like a physical thing, as though an ocean of dark matter filled the mountain above and was now pouring out.

  Horus felt hurricane winds tear at him, yet was unmoved.

  He felt the cold of space, a soul-deep chill that enveloped him in ice. He was alone, floating in an empty void.

  No stars illuminated him.

  He had no memory of passing through the gate, then berated himself for so literal an interpretation. The gate beneath the mountain was not a literal portal separating one space from another, but an allegorical one. Just by spilling his blood upon stone that was not stone he had passed through. By enacting his desire with Worldbreaker, he had hurled himself heedless into the domain of gods and monsters.

  A realm he knew of only in myth and the ravings of lunatics put down in proscribed texts and lurid works passed off as fiction. This was a place unconstrained by the limits of the physical world. The laws governing existence in the material world held no sway here and were endlessly flouted.

  Even as he came to that understanding, the void surrounding him conspired to refute that notion. A world faded up, a terrible place of bone white sands and blood-red mountains and orange skies lit by global fires.

  The air tasted of ash and regret, of sorrow and fecundity.

  Horus heard the clash of swords, but no battle. The plaintive cries of lovers, but no flesh. Whispers surrounded him, plotting and scheming as he felt the cyclic entropy of his flesh. Old cells dying, new ones born to replace them.

  He blinked away the heat of the sky, now seeing it wasn’t the orange of a reflected blaze, but the blaze itself.

  The heavens were on fire from horizon to horizon.

  A firestorm blazed over distant mountains, swollen by forks of ruby red lightning rippling upwards from their summits.

  Horus felt the ground beneath him become more solid, and looked down to see that he stood within a circle of flagstones fashioned from obsidian. Eight radiating arms vanished into the far distance, and the landscape twisted in hideous ways along each of the pathways.

  Acres of wire grew with the moaning bodies of his closest sons hung upon barbed spikes. Flickering lights skimmed desolate bogs that burped and hissed with the decay of rotting corpses. Silken deserts of serpentine fogbanks of perfumed musks. Labyrinthine forests of claw-branched trees clung to a series of rounded hills, each with eight doors set around their circumferences.

  ‘I’ve travelled realms like this before,’ said Horus, though there was no one to hear. No one obvious, at least.

  Each of the four cardinal paths ended at a mountaintop fortress to rival that of the Emperor’s palace. Their walls were brass and gold, bone and earth. They glimmered in the ruddy light of the firestorm. Screams issued from each of them and booming laughter of mad gods rolled down from the peaks.

  ‘They are mocking you,’ said a voice behind him.

  Horus turned, knowing what he would see.

  The Cruor Angelus was the red of a battlefield sunset, its armour no longer splintered and broken, its face no longer a charred nightmare of agony. The chains encircling its body were gone, but the light of extinguished suns still burned in its dead eyes.

  ‘Why are you here?’ said Horus.

  ‘I am home,’ said the Red Angel. ‘I am unbound. The cold iron Erebus hung on me has no power here, nor do the warding oaths cut into my skin. Here I am the sum of all horror, the thirster after blood and the devourer of souls.’

  Horus ignored its grandstanding. ‘So why are they mocking me?’

  ‘You are a mortal in a realm of gods. You are an insect to the Pantheon. Insignificant and unworthy of notice, a fragment of dust in the cosmic wind.’

  Horus sighed. ‘Noctua was right, all you warp things are ridiculously overwrought.’

  Razored bone talons ripped from its gauntlets. Curling horns tore from its brow. ‘You are in my realm, where you will see only what we wish you to see. I can snuff you out like a candle flame, Warmaster.’

  ‘If you’re trying to intimidate me, you’re doing a poor job of it,’ said Horus, taking a step towards the daemon. ‘Let me tell you what I know. You exist in both realms, but if I destroy your body, your time in my world is over.’

  The Angel laughed and stepped to meet his advance.

  ‘Daemons never die,’ it said.

  ‘No, but they do get incredibly tiresome,’ said Horus, reaching up to wrap his hand around the Red Angel’s throat. He lifted it from the ground and squeezed. It spat black ichor and the fire in its eyes blazed.

  ‘Release me!’ it roared, clawing at his arms. Blood welled from the cuts and splashed the mirror-black flagstones. Black veins of disintegrating blood vessels spread down Horus’s arm at the daemon’s touch. He felt the internal mechanisms of his body decaying, but only crushed the daemon’s neck harder.

  ‘You will die for this!’ spat the daemon.

  ‘One day perhaps,’ said Horus. ‘But not today. You weren’t sent here to kill me.’

  Horus nodded to the vast citadels in the mountains. ‘You’re here to guide me. Your masters need me, so take me to their fortresses, speak my name and tell them the galaxy’s
new master would treat with them.’

  Horus dropped the Red Angel and for a moment he thought it might fly at him in a rage. Booming thunder rolled down from the mountains, bellows of anger, squeals of delight and more sibilant whispers. A million voices swept the nightmarish landscape, and the Red Angel’s claws retreated into its gauntlet.

  ‘Very well, I will take you to the Ruinous Powers,’ it said with a hiss of venom that curdled the air. ‘The Obsidian Way is the eternal road. It is perilous for flesh and soul. It is not for mortals to walk, for its dangers are–’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Horus. ‘Just shut the hell up.’

  Aximand cried out at the awful sensation of blindness. His helmet’s auto-senses had failed the instant the Warmaster’s hammer struck the black wall. He tore his helmet off, but was still in the dark. Not just a darkened space, but a place of utter absence, as though the very idea of light had yet to become real.

  ‘Ezekyle!’ he yelled. ‘Falkus! Sound off!’

  No response.

  What had happened? Had they failed? Had Lupercal inadvertently unleashed some hideous apocalypse on them? Aximand felt as though his entire body was enveloped in viscous glue. Every breath was laden with toxins, with bile and with sweet, cloying tastes that sickened him to the core.

  ‘Ezekyle!’ he yelled again. ‘Falkus! Sound off! Anyone!’

  And almost as soon as it had begun it was over.

  Aximand blinked as the world came back again. He spun around, seeing the same confusion in the faces of his brothers. Even Mortarion appeared discomfited. The Deathshroud gathered close to their master as the Justaerin looked around for someone to protect.

  ‘Where is he?’ demanded Abaddon, though Aximand wasn’t sure who he was addressing. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Exactly where he intended,’ said Mortarion, looking at the black gate. It had previously appeared to be a slab of polished obsidian, but now it was a vertical pool of black oil. Rippling concentric rings spread over its surface, as though raindrops were falling on it from the other side.