The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Two guardians stood vigil outside my door. Both were clad in bronze-edged cobalt ceramite, with their helms marked by high Kheltaran head crests, reminiscent of Prosperine history and the ancient Ahztik-Gypton empires of Old Earth. Both of them turned their heads towards me, just as expected. One of them even nodded in slow greeting, solemn as any temple gargoyle. Once, this display of life would have teased me with the threat of false hope, but I was beyond such delusions now. My kindred were long gone, slain by Ahriman’s hubris. These Rubricae, these husks of ashen undeath, stood in their place.

  ‘Mekhari. Djedhor.’ I greeted them by name, futile as it was.

  Khayon, Mekhari managed to project the name, but it was a thing of cold and simple obedience, not true recognition.

  Dust, sent Djedhor. He’d been the one to nod. All is dust.

  My brothers, I sent back to the Rubricae.

  Looking upon them with the penetrative stare of second sight was maddening, for I saw both life and death in the ceramite husks they had become. I reached for them, not physically but with a hesitant pressure of psychic awareness. It was the same subtle straining one might do to listen for a distant voice on a silent night.

  I felt the nearness of their souls, no different from when they’d walked among the living. But within their armour was nothing but ash. Within their minds was mist instead of memory.

  From Djedhor, I sensed the scarcest ember of recollection: a flash of white flame eclipsing all else, lasting no more than a moment. That was how Djedhor had died. How the whole Legion had died. In rapturous fire.

  Although Mekhari’s mind sometimes offered the same insignificant pulse of remembrance, I sensed nothing from him then. The latter Rubricae regarded me with an emotionless, motionless stare of its helm’s T-visor, clutching its bolter in stately guardianship.

  On more than one occasion, I had tried to explain the living-dead contradiction to Nefertari, but the right words always failed me. The last time we’d spoken of it, it had ended particularly poorly.

  ‘They are there and not there,’ I’d said to her. ‘Husks. Shadows. I cannot explain it to someone without the second sight. It is like trying to describe music to someone born deaf.’

  At the time, Nefertari had run her clawed gauntlet down Mekhari’s helm, her crystal nails scraping over one staring red eye lens. Her skin was whiter than milk, paler than marble, translucent enough to show faint cobwebs beneath the skin of her angular cheeks. She looked half-dead herself.

  ‘You explain it,’ she had replied with a dry, alien smile, ‘by saying that music is the sound of emotion, expressed through art, from musician to audience.’

  I had nodded at her elegant rebuttal, but said nothing more. The details of my brothers’ curse weren’t something I enjoyed sharing even with her, not least because I shared the blame for their fate. I was the one who had tried to stop Ahriman’s last throw of the dice. I was the one who had failed.

  The familiar throb of guilt-stained irritation pulled me back to the present. Gyre growled by my side.

  Follow, I bade the two Rubricae. The command cracked down the psychic filament linking the three of us, and the bond thrummed with their acknowledgement. Mekhari and Djedhor’s boot-steps thudded on the decking as they trailed behind.

  In the long thoroughfare leading to the bridge, another vox-speaker crackled to life.

  ‘Come to us,’ it said. Another toneless entreaty to venture deeper into the ship’s cold hallways.

  I looked directly at one of the bronze aural receptors dotting the arched walls of the main spinal corridor. This one was forged in the shape of a smiling, androgynous burial mask.

  ‘Why?’ I asked it.

  The confession was whispered from speakers all over the ship, just another voice among the songs of ghosts.

  ‘Because we are lonely.’

  Life aboard the Tlaloc was a thing of contrast and contradiction, as with all Imperial vessels cast onto the shores of Hell. Realms of stability and tormented currents existed throughout the Great Eye, and the ships that sailed inside Eyespace eventually settled into similar states of infrequent flux.

  It’s a realm where thought becomes reality, if one has the willpower necessary to bring forth something from the warp’s nothingness. If a mortal yearns for something, the warp will often provide it, though rarely without unexpected cost.

  Once the weakest souls killed themselves with an inability to control their wayward imaginations, structure among the crew began to rise from the disordered rubble. Within the Tlaloc’s arched halls, society soon reformed around an oppressive meritocracy. Those who were most useful to me rose above those who were not. It was that simple.

  Many of our crew were human, taken as slaves in raids during the Legion Wars. Beneath them were the servitors, and above them were the bestial mutants harvested from the genetic stock of Sortiarius. The braying of their ritual battles echoed down the halls night after night, as they did battle on lower decks that stank of beasts’ fur and animal sweat.

  It took almost two hours to reach the Anamnesis. Two hours of bulkheads slowly grinding open on low power; two hours of juddering ascent/descent platforms; two hours of dark corridors and the sound of warp song torturing the ship’s metal bones. Through the unmelody of straining creaks, infrequent shivers coursed through Tlaloc’s predatory form as the ship split the Eye’s densest tides.

  Outside, a storm raged. Rare were the times we needed to reactivate the Geller field within the Eye, but this region was more warp than reality, and an ocean of daemons burned in our wake.

  I paid no heed to the warp’s tune. Others among our warband claimed to hear voices in the harshest storms – the voices of allies and enemies, of betrayers and the betrayed. I heard no such thing. No voices, at least.

  Gyre trailed us, occasionally vanishing into the shadows on the whim of whatever hunts tempted her. My wolf would enter a spread of darkness, and emerge elsewhere from another shadow. Each time she melted into nothingness, I’d feel a resonant shiver through the unseen bond that bound us together.

  In contrast, Mekhari and Djedhor stalked behind in mute compliance. I took a solemn solace in their company. They were a stalwart presence, if not gifted conversationalists.

  Sometimes I found myself speaking to them as though they were still alive, discussing my plans with them and replying to their stoic silence as if they’d actually answered. I wondered what my still-breathing kindred would make of my behaviour back on Sortiarius, and whether any of the other Thousand Sons survivors were guilty of the same indulgence.

  The deeper we walked through the ship, the less it resembled a melancholy fortress, and the closer it came to a slum. Machinery became more ramshackle, and attending humans ever more wretched. They bowed as I passed. Some wept. Some scattered like vermin before the light. They all knew better than to speak to me. I bore them no special hatred, but the hive-swarm of their thoughts made them unpleasant to be near. They lived meaningless lives in the dark, born and living and dying as slaves to masters they could not comprehend, in a war they didn’t understand.

  Disease ravaged the lower decks in cycles of plague. Most of our slave raids were for simple mass-replenishment of unskilled labour, but once every few decades we would need to strike against another Legion to restock the crew decks in the wake of another Eyeborn contagion. The Eye of Terror was unkind to the powerless and the weak of will.

  When I reached the great linked chambers of the Outer Core, the Anamnesis’s eroding sense of order began to take over. The vast halls were populated by servitors and robed cultists of the Machine-God, all dealing with the clanking machinery that lined the walls and ceilings, and nestled in pits cut into the floors. Here was the Tlaloc’s brain laid bare: its veins formed of composite cables and twined wires, its meat made of decaying black steel engines and rusting iron generators.

  The mono-tasked work crews
largely ignored their master’s passage, though their cultist overseers bowed and scraped much as the human herd did on the decks above. I sensed their reluctance to bow before any authority that didn’t share their worship of the Omnissiah, but I was not unkind to them. By remaining here, they were allowed to serve the needs of the Anamnesis itself, and that was an honour coveted by many in the Machine Cult.

  A few managed to offer genuinely respectful gestures of submission in acknowledgement when they registered me as the ship’s commander. Their respect was meaningless, nor was I concerned with those who lacked it. Unlike the unskilled human menials who also lived their sunless lives in the ship’s bowels, these priests had more pressing duties than prostrating themselves before a lord who paid them little heed in kind. I let them work in peace, and they accorded me the same polite ignorance.

  Rising above the hunched priests and shambling servitors were several robotic sentinels: humanoid Thallaxi- and Baharat-class cybernetic warriors in each chamber. All of them stood motionless, with their heads lowered and weapons slung. As with the servitors, the inactive robots made no note of our passing from the Outer Core to the Inner.

  The Inner Core was a lone vault shielded behind a series of sealed bulkheads, accessible only by the highest-ranking souls on the ship. Automated laser turrets cycled into reluctant life, sliding from wall housings on crunching mechanisms and tracking our approach across the gantry deck. I doubted more than half of them still had the power to fire, but it was reassuring to see the machine-spirit controlling the Tlaloc still upheld certain standards.

  The doorway to the Inner Core was almost palatial in ostentation. The doors themselves were great slabs of dark metal engraved with the sinuous, coiling forms of Prosperine serpents, their crested heads held high, their jaws wide to devour twin suns.

  The only guardian here was another Baharat automaton: four metres of mechanical muscle and metallic might, armed with rotor cannons on its shoulders. Unlike those of the Outer Core, this one remained active. Its joints still exhaled piston breath; its weapon mounts hummed with live charge.

  The cyborg’s featureless faceplate regarded me in emotionless judgement, before stalking aside on heavy iron foot-claws. It didn’t speak. Almost nothing spoke down here. Everything communicated in blurts of scrambled machine code when vocalisation was required at all.

  I pressed a hand to one of the immense sculptures – my palm covered only a single scale on the left serpent’s hide – and projected a momentary pulse of thought beyond the sealed gateway.

  I am here.

  With a discordant orchestra of slamming lock-bars and rattling machinery, the first of the seven bulkheads began the arduous process of opening.

  A machine-spirit is the incarnation of that most precious of unions: the literal bond between mankind and the Machine-God. To the tech-priests of the Martian Mechanicum – that purer, worthier institute predating the hidebound Adeptus Mechanicus – there is no more sacred state of being than this divine merging.

  Most machine-spirits are nevertheless crude, limited things, formed of chosen biological components kept alive in a synthetic chemical stew, then slave-linked to the systems they will spend eternity operating at the behest of inloaded programming. In an empire where artificial intelligence is unrivalled heresy, the creation of machine-spirits keeps the vital human spirit at the core of any automated process.

  At the commonly held peak of this technology are the war machines of the Space Marine Legions and the Martian cults, allowing warriors to fight on past mutilation and death within the armoured shell of a cybernetic warlord. At the more mundane end of the spectrum are the targeting assistance arrays of battle tanks and gunships, right through to the secondary cognition engines of city-sized warships sailing the void.

  But other templates exist. Other variations on the theme. Not every invention is created equal.

  I am here, I sent beyond the door.

  I sensed the machine-spirit’s biological components twisting in their tank of cold aqua vitriolo, as it sent its reply through a series of enslaved system functions. A moment later, the doorways of the Inner Core started the Rituals of Unlocking.

  The entity at the ship’s heart, known as the Anamnesis, was waiting. She was very good at that.

  Cease, I sent to my brothers, in wordless command. Mekhari and Djedhor stopped moving at once, bolters cradled low.

  Kill anyone that seeks entry. An unnecessary order – no one would make it into the Inner Core without the Anamnesis allowing it – but I was gratified by the hesitant psychic acknowledgement that echoed from whatever spectral remnant animated Djedhor’s armour. Mekhari was still silent. I wasn’t concerned by his silence – these things came and went, like irregular tides.

  With the order given, both of the Rubricae warriors turned back to face the last doorway, raising their bolters and taking aim. There they stood, silent and unmoving, loyal beyond the grave.

  ‘Khayon,’ the Anamnesis greeted me.

  She was more than many machine-spirits – more, at least, than a platter of organs in an amniotic tank. The Anamnesis hadn’t endured vivisection before being consigned to her fate. She was almost whole, floating nude in her wide, tall tank of aqua vitriolo. Her shaven head was connected to the chamber’s hundreds of machines by a gorgon’s crown of thick cables implanted into her skull. Her skin, in sunlight, had been the colour of caramel. In this chamber, and inside her liquid tomb, time had paled her flesh considerably.

  Secondary brains – some synthetically engineered, others taken by force from the still-living bodies of their unwilling donors – were cradled in seed-like generator housings, attached like leeches to the sides of her containment tank.

  Purifiers hummed beneath her cradle of reinforced glass, cleansing and replenishing her cold fluid. She was, for all intents and purposes, a young adult female locked in an artificial womb, trading true life for immortality in icy fluid.

  She saw with the Tlaloc’s auspex scanners. She fought by firing its cannons. She thought with the hundreds of secondary brains enslaved to her own, turning her into a gestalt entity, far beyond her former humanity.

  ‘Are you well?’ I asked her.

  The Anamnesis floated to the front of her tank, looking out at me with dead eyes. Her hand pressed to the glass, palm out, as though she could touch my armour, but the absence of all life in her stare robbed the moment of any affection.

  ‘We function,’ she replied. The machine-spirit’s voice inside the Inner Core was a soft, androgynous tone no longer shrouded in crackles of vox corruption. It manifested from the mouths of fourteen ivory gargoyles, seven leering from the north wall, seven leering from the south. They were sculpted to be clawing their way from the walls, emerging through the labyrinth of cables and generators that turned the Inner Core into an industrial cityscape. ‘We see two of your dead men.’

  ‘It is Mekhari and Djedhor.’

  That made her lips twitch. ‘We knew them Before.’ Then she looked down at the wolf, who had emerged from the shadows cast by one of the whining generators. ‘We see Gyre.’

  The beast sat on its haunches, watching her in its unwolfish way. Its eyes were the same pearlescent hue as the amniotic fluid that supported the machine-spirit’s body.

  I dragged my gaze from the unhealthy pallor of the girl’s face, pressing my hand to the glass in reflection of her greeting. As always, I reached for her on instinct and sensed nothing beyond the insectile buzz of the million cogitations taking place in her gestalt mind.

  But she’d smiled at the mention of Mekhari and Djedhor, and that made me cautious. She shouldn’t have smiled. The Anamnesis never smiled.

  Caution gave way to that most treacherous of temptations: hope. Could the smile have meant more than a flicker of muscle memory?

  ‘Tell me something,’ I began. The Anamnesis remained focused on Gyre, as the maiden drifted through t
he milky murk.

  ‘We know what you will ask,’ she said.

  ‘I should have asked before now, but with the dream of wolves fresh in my thoughts, I am less inclined towards my usual patience and self-delusion.’

  She allowed herself a nod, another unnecessarily human gesture.

  ‘We wait for the question.’

  ‘I want the truth.’

  ‘We do not lie,’ she answered at once.

  ‘Because you choose not to lie, or because you can’t lie?’

  ‘Irrelevant. The result is the same. We do not lie.’

  ‘You smiled just now, when I told you I was with Mekhari and Djedhor.’

  Dead-eyed, she still stared. ‘An unrelated motor response from our biological components. A twist of muscle and sinew. Nothing more.’

  My hand against the glass formed a slow fist. ‘Just tell me. Tell me if there’s anything left of her inside you. Anything at all.’

  She turned in the fluid, a ghost in the fog whispering from the chamber’s speakers. Her eyes were a shark’s eyes, with the same blunt and selfish soullessness.

  ‘We are the Anamnesis,’ she said at last. ‘We are One, from Many. The She you seek is merely the dominant percentage of our biological component cluster. The She you remember holds no stronger role in our cognitive matrix than any other mind.’

  I said nothing. Just met her eyes.

  ‘We register the emotive responses of sorrow on your features, Khayon.’

  ‘All is well. Thank you for the answer.’

  ‘She chose this, Khayon. She volunteered to become the Anamnesis.’

  ‘I know.’

  The Anamnesis pressed her hand to the glass again, her palm against my fist, separated by the dense glass.

  ‘We have caused you emotional harm.’

  I have never been a good liar. The talent evaded me since birth. Even so, I hoped the false smile would deceive her.