The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘You exaggerate my attachment to mortal concerns,’ I replied. ‘I was merely curious.’

  ‘We register your voice pattern indicating a significant emotional investment in this matter.’

  That turned my smile more sincere. I couldn’t help but wonder why her Mechanicum creators gave her the capacity to analyse such things.

  ‘Do not exceed your mandate, Anamnesis. Fly the ship and leave my concerns to me.’

  ‘We will obey.’ She turned in the fluid again. Cables and wires connected to her shaven head streamed out in mechanical mimicry of hair. Somehow, she looked almost hesitant. ‘We repeat our request for conversational exchange,’ she stated with bizarrely feminine politeness.

  I paced the chamber, my footfalls silent in the muted growls of the machine-spirit’s life-support engines.

  ‘What would you like to speak of?’ I asked, circling her glass prison. She drifted with me, following my movements.

  ‘We wish only to communicate. The subject is irrelevant. Speak and we shall listen. Tell a tale. An anecdote. A report. A story.’

  ‘You have heard all my stories.’

  ‘We have not. Not all. Tell us of Prospero. Tell us when darkness came to the City of Light.’

  ‘You were there.’

  ‘We bore witness to the aftermath. We felt none of the moment’s immediacy. We were not running through the streets with a bolter in our hands.’

  I closed my eyes as the howls broke free of my dreams and chased me even here, to this chamber. Across the deck, Gyre made a throaty sound that seemed an alloy of a snarl and a chuckle. No matter how much I had lost with the fall of my birth world, the wolf remembered it differently. As she was so fond of reminding me, Gyre had fed very well that day.

  ‘Another time, perhaps.’

  ‘We recognise that your voice pattern–’

  ‘Enough please, Itzara. I don’t care about my voice pattern.’

  She stared as she always stared: a paradox of dead eyes and disconcerting focus. As I met her gaze, I caught sight of my own wraithlike reflection in the glass wall of her tank. An image of white robes and dusky skin; a boy born of a hot world and swollen with archeo-genetic ingenuity to become a weapon of war.

  The Anamnesis floated closer, both hands against the glass now, her mouth slack in the murk. Nothing about her looked alive.

  ‘Do not address us by that name,’ she said. ‘The She of that name is now One of the Many. We are not Itzara. We are the Anamnesis.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘We no longer desire your presence, Khayon.’

  ‘You have no authority over me, machine.’

  She didn’t reply. As she floated in her tideless fluid, her face cocked as if heeding a distant voice. Her fingertips lifted from the glass, stroking several of the cables socketed into her bare head.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘You are needed.’

  She looked into my eyes, and for a moment it seemed she would smile again. No such expression manifested. Her fey stare continued unabated.

  ‘We hear the alien’s cries,’ she said. ‘She screams for your presence across the vox. But you are here, bare of armour, and do not answer.’

  ‘What does she require of me?’ I asked, though I could guess the answer. The alien had shown incredible strength resisting it for this long.

  ‘She thirsts,’ the Anamnesis replied. Again, the flicker in her eyes of something that never quite became emotion. The edge of discomfort, perhaps. Or the shadow of disgust. Or, as she claimed, mere muscle memory. ‘Do you wish to communicate with her?’

  And say what?

  ‘No. Seal the Aerie. Lock her inside.’

  There was no pause, no hesitation. The Anamnesis didn’t even blink. ‘It is done.’

  In the stillness that followed, I looked into the Anamnesis’s passive eyes. ‘Activate my arming servitors, please. I need my armour.’

  ‘It is done,’ she replied. ‘We are cognisant of Nefertari’s usefulness. Thus, we ask if you plan to kill her.’

  ‘What? No, of course not. What kind of man do you think I am?’

  ‘We do not think you are a man at all, Khayon. We think you are a weapon with lingering traces of humanity. Now go to your alien, Iskandar Khayon. She needs you.’

  I turned to leave, but not to go to my bloodward. To arm myself and prepare for the fleet muster. To let Nefertari lie in the dark a while longer.

  HEART OF THE STORM

  You will hear Imperial preachers cry of warp ‘corruption’; of ‘Chaos’ and its random nature. These are falsehoods. There is a malevolence in the Pantheon, a true and sentient malevolence. The existence of such vast and dark emotion defies the notion of any truly random influence. Both cannot be true.

  The empyrean’s alterations and flesh-changes are not accidental, indiscriminate mutations. The warp, for all its seething madness, hones its chosen. It reshapes them, siphoning the secrets of their souls and writing those truths upon their mortal flesh. When a pilot melts into the console of his fighter or gunship, it is not on the random curse of bodily horror or some unknowable divine whim. For all the pain he endures, he finds his reflexes and reactions far more attuned, as well as taking enhanced chemical and sensory pleasure in the kills he makes in the void. A warrior’s weapons become extensions of his body, reflecting the importance he places upon them in his heart.

  This is the simplest truth of life in the Great Eye. Everyone sees your sins, your secrets and lusts, written plain across your flesh.

  And the warp always has a plan. An infinity of plans. A plan for every soul.

  The Tlaloc had spent centuries sailing in seas where reality and the underworld met in seething waves. Its bridge housed seven hundred souls, most permanently bound to their stations by some degree of cybernetic enhancement, or a more ‘natural’ fusion of flesh and machine as a result of the warship’s long years in Eyespace.

  A colossal occulus-screen dominated the forward wall, showing a world gently turning at the heart of a violet storm. Reaching the neutral ground chosen for the fleet muster had taken a supreme effort of focus, yet here they were. It had to be difficult to reach, for the most obvious of reasons: one did not plan treachery in full view of one’s enemies.

  After sailing through the furious tempest, the heart of the storm was a welcome respite for all of us, but those of us who were psychically aware felt an especial relief. On our journey to the muster, the storm had housed countless lost souls and the formless entities that fed upon them. Both breeds of aetheric spirit had clawed at the shield of reality projected around the Tlaloc: the souls of the dead, shrieking as they burned in the warp’s waves, and the Neverborn as they raged and feasted.

  Here, at the heart of the storm at last, it was calm. Much of the Great Eye was calmer than this tormented region. Most of it, even. But it suited our purposes for now.

  ‘Your alien is still screaming,’ said my brother Ashur-Kai. ‘I sent several slaves for her to devour. They seem not to have helped.’

  Ashur-Kai had red eyes and forever wore an expression of cautious disgust. There was nothing supernatural in his scarlet gaze, merely a physical defect he’d endured since birth. His overblooded irises reacted poorly to bright light, much as his chalk-white skin burned easily under the unwelcome kiss of any world’s sun. The addition of Space Marine Legion gene-seed had diminished his difficulties – before becoming a warrior of the Legiones Astartes, he’d struggled to even open his sore eyes in direct sunlight – but there was no cure or reversal for achromia.

  To his face, the crew addressed him as Lord Qezramah – never quite pronouncing his bloodline name correctly – or more simply ‘the lord-navigator’. Among the Legion warbands that knew of him, he was more commonly called the White Seer.

  We were all aware that behind his back, he was more often known among
the mortal crew by less flattering titles. These were of no interest to him. As long as his slaves respected him and obeyed him, he cared nothing for their thoughts.

  When he spoke aloud rather than falling into the familiar ease of silent speech, everything he said came in a low drawl that held an uncomfortably wet edge. It was a voice that made it very easy to speak convincing threats, though Ashur-Kai was not a man who needed to speak in order to be threatening. Nor was he, by any stretch of the imagination, a gentle soul. He strove for efficiency and he appreciated subtlety. These things mattered to him. They mattered a great deal.

  He had a throne on the bridge’s central dais that he rarely occupied, preferring to stand alone on the high gantry balcony above the crew stations, tuning out the living sounds and smells of all those below. He didn’t care for the view offered by the occulus, either. His twin duties were to reach and to see, and seeing required no small degree of effort. So there he would stand, raised above his brethren and our shared slaves, staring through the unshielded window portals and out into the naked void of Eyespace.

  His throne – positioned before my command station and only slightly lower – bristled with innumerable connection feeds and psychically sensitive systems that allowed him to remotely bond his mind to the ship’s machine-spirit. Such an interface was easier to use than the alternative, but he found it unresponsive and sluggish. It simply didn’t approach the purity of truly unified thought. Easier by far to simply reach and touch minds with the Anamnesis; sharing thoughts with her physical components through a telepathic bond and letting her see though his sixth sense. Such a bond allowed a harmony of action and reaction with the Tlaloc that no Imperial-born Navigators hardwired into their own thrones could match.

  That did not mean it was easy. He once told me that he doubted any human would be capable of mustering the necessary depth of focus, and I believed him without question. If his psychic duties left him weary after several days, an unmodified human would have no hope at all. Power emanated from him in a white aura that never offered any warmth. It was like bathing in the memory of sunlight.

  He didn’t look at me as he spoke. I felt a momentary brush as his senses caressed mine in passing: the psychic equivalent of making eye contact. In the moment of connection, I felt my own aura reflected back at me. Whereas his was sunless light, my essence carried the unmistakable feeling of knives stroking across silk.

  ‘You could at least thank me for feeding her,’ he said, still without turning around.

  I came to stand next to him, leaning on the upper deck’s guardrail. Active armour hummed with every movement we made.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, rather agreeably.

  ‘I was saving those slaves for myself. To watch for patterns in how their blood fell. To capture their last breaths, and hear their souls’ desires in those final gasps. To take the vitreous humours of their eyes so I might see the secrets in their uncried tears.’

  ‘You are being unbearably dramatic,’ I told him.

  ‘And you are a singularly miserable seer, Sekhandur.’

  ‘So you keep saying.’

  ‘I mean it. You are blinded by sentiment, and have no mind for details. However, anything to silence her cries is a worthwhile sacrifice. That creature gives me a headache.’

  I was watching the dead ship drift before us on the occulus, and noting the spread of several other warships, all holding back from one another. Prosperine runes streamed down the viewscreen next to each vessel, noting the results of initial auspex sweeps.

  Too few ships. Far too few.

  ‘Something is wrong,’ Ashur-Kai ventured.

  ‘The number of vessels is disheartening. Perhaps others are still on their way.’

  ‘No, not with the fleet. Something is wrong with the skeins of fate. How many times have I dreamed of this storm in the last few months? We sail into danger, mark my words.’

  Few things make my teeth itch in irritation the way prophecy does. What other science or sorcery is so useless and imprecise? What other art relies so heavily on hindsight?

  Ashur-Kai’s red eyes finally descended to gaze upon me. ‘Are you ready for this?’

  I nodded and said nothing. He followed my stare, regarding the occulus. The names of anchored ships, each keeping a cautious distance from its fellows, skittered across the visual display: Baleful Eye; Jaws of the White Hound; Royal Spear.

  This small fleet circled the grand wreckage of a powerless battle cruiser. The ship was long dead, slain a century ago by the guns of men and the blades of daemons. Once, it had sailed the stars in the wake of a demigod’s ambition, bearing the name His Chosen Son with the fiercest pride. Now, it rolled as it drifted in the heart of the storm, a thing of open wounds and storm-twisted metal. It would serve as our neutral ground, as it had done a handful of times before.

  The still-living ships drifted closer, each one shielded against the threat of lance-fire from its approaching kindred. Every one of them was a fortress in its own right, marked by spinal battlements and jutting prows, and housing a city’s worth of slave crews within vast hulls of battered armour plating.

  The grandest of them was a fine monument to mankind’s ability to craft weapons of war: the Baleful Eye. A battleship among cruisers, she bore the scars of her countless wars along a sea-green hull. Royal Spear and Rise of the Three Suns drifted alongside their flagship, seeming almost hesitant to approach the dead hulk. His Chosen Son, at least what was left of it, bore the remnants of their Legion’s colours.

  Every ship present had seen better days, and that is a generous appraisal. Falkus’s small fleet was close to devastated.

  Jaws of the White Hound, twinned with the Tlaloc as the smallest cruiser, had come in slower, but anchored closest of all. We kept our distance.

  ‘Falkus and the Duraga kal Esmejhak are already here,’ I gestured to the streaming runes. ‘As is Lheor of the Fifteen Fangs.’

  Ashur-Kai’s thin lips curled at the last name. ‘How delightful.’

  I turned to another spill of smooth Prosperine runes. ‘I don’t recognise that vessel. The other ship in the colours of the Sixteenth... Who commands the Rise of the Three Suns?’

  The albino sorcerer looked at me for a long, unblinking, unimpressed moment. ‘I am not a Legion archivist,’ he said. ‘And given the damage it has sustained, I suspect that whomever commanded the Three Suns during the Siege is unlikely to still stand at the helm.’

  I waved aside the cantankerous reply and called down to the operations deck.

  ‘Hail the Baleful Eye.’

  Humans, and things that had once been human, moved to obey. As we waited for the communication channel to open, Ashur-Kai busied himself by drawing his sword and examining the swirling runes engraved down its sides.

  ‘I suggest you take the Ragged Knight along for this... negotiation.’

  Something dark must have flashed across my face. Even at his most expressive, Ashur-Kai scarcely had any emotions worth concealing, but in that moment faint surprise registered across his white features in the rise of his thin eyebrows.

  ‘What?’ the albino asked. ‘What is it?’

  ‘He is resisting me lately,’ I admitted.

  ‘I will bear that in mind. But take the Ragged Knight, Khayon. We are relying on the honour of honourless men. Let us take no chances.’

  The lords of the three armies met on neutral ground. There was no gravity. We moved in the halting tread of magnetic boot-locks, which made for a singularly graceless gait. Each of us led a handful of bodyguards and bloodwards onto the wreckage of His Chosen Son, where we came together in the powerless, airless dark of the dead ship’s command deck. Dozens of empty control thrones faced a shattered occulus viewscreen. Frozen, mutated bodies of servitors were rotted away by warp erosion, many floating free, while others were still bound to their restraint cradles. They watched our negotiations, tho
se desiccated idols of frosted bones, staring with inactive vision lenses, hollow sockets, and ice-rimed eyes.

  Dead warriors were scattered across the deck – warriors clad in time-ruined suits of ceramite armour, bearing the eroded markings of the Sons of Horus. The ship had been dead a long, long time. Her crew remained unburied and unburned.

  Falkus had arrived first. His warriors, all clad in armour of oceanic green or Justaerin black, had secured the area and taken up defensive positions across the strategium. One fire team crouched in place on the raised dais towards the rear of the bridge, armed with heavy sniper rifles held at rest. Several other squads occupied junction points and raised platforms, warriors crouching or covering kneeling brothers; others had their guns lifted to aim towards the several open bulkheads leading to the rest of the ship.

  I recognised several Sons of Horus officers despite the changes wrought to their battleplate. There is no hiding an identity from those who can read minds. Every essence has its own flavour, every personality projects its own aura.

  Our group entered beneath the tracking sway of a dozen bolter barrels.

  ‘How reassuring to see Falkus is still such a careful creature,’ Ashur-Kai said over the vox. He was back aboard the Tlaloc yet mind-joined to me, looking through my eyes and no doubt seeing the feed from my helmet’s recording sensors, as well. The crackle of electrocommunication hadn’t dried out the wetness of his voice.

  Guns down, Falkus. I pulsed the words alone, careful not to allow any emotion into the telepathy that would turn a request into a psychic compulsion.

  Falkus stood alone, not far from where an armoured corpse was belted into the central command throne. His Terminator helm was no longer crested purely by an officer’s plume but by two curling ram-like horns, which formed a monstrous ivory crown. He lifted a hand at my silent words, the order for his men to aim their weapons elsewhere.

  A series of crackles preceded his voice, as our armour’s vox systems attuned to one another.

  ‘Khayon,’ he said, and I heard unhidden relief in his tone.