The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  I knew the ship at once, as did Lheor. Only a handful of those battleships had ever been constructed; the Emperor himself had granted them to his Space Marine Legions to serve as flagships. Only one Gloriana vessel in all the Emperor’s fleets was born from the Scylla variant construction schema.

  Lheor crossed his arms over his breastplate. He wore the Imperialis across his chest, displaying the winged skull of Imperial loyalty without a shadow of shame. He even polished it, so that it gleamed silver against the dark red plate. I believe he enjoyed the irony.

  His neck servos purred over the vox as he gave a curt shake of his head. ‘Your Legion just died, my brother. Now is not the time to chase ghosts.’

  ‘I mean it,’ Falkus said in his avalanche voice. ‘I will find the Vengeful Spirit. With it I can destroy the Canticle City.’

  ‘Hundreds of warbands have sought it for centuries,’ I pointed out as gently as I could.

  ‘Hundreds of warbands had no idea where to look.’

  ‘And you believe you do?’

  He thumbed another setting on the hololithic projector. The image blurred for several seconds, at last resolving into a rough illusion of the Great Eye. With his free hand, he marked out the Eye’s coreward edge – those blighted stars facing Terra.

  ‘The Radiant Worlds.’

  Lheor’s laugh was a gunshot across the vox. ‘How do you plan to sail your broken ships through the Firetide?’

  That was the wrong question. I asked the right one. ‘How do you know the Vengeful Spirit is there?’

  Falkus deactivated the image. ‘I was told the flagship lies hidden in a dust nebula beyond the Firetide. I will take my fleet into the Radiant Worlds, and I want you both to come with me.’

  Beyond the Firetide. So that was why he needed me.

  Neither Lheor nor I said anything in reply. Perhaps to others, Falkus’s words would have reeked of simple desperation. His need to hunt his Legion’s former flagship might suggest an inability to outrun the past, tragically hungering for former glories at the cost of carving a new future. But to assume such a thing misunderstands the scale of how far the Sons of Horus had fallen.

  From standing as first among equals, they stood now on the edge of extinction. How many of their worlds had fallen since the Nine Legions first took refuge in the Eye? How many ships had they lost, either to battle or to the plundering hands of rival armies? I, of all those he might have summoned, would never mock him for raging against the dying of the light. No matter how futile it was.

  The Monument was destroyed and their father’s corpse was stolen, desecrating even the Legion’s legacy. Falkus’s plan wasn’t desperation. With Lupercalios gone the Sons of Horus were past that point, for desperation is a symptom of hope. It wasn’t even survival. It was the last gasp of a warrior who refused to die with his duty undone. One final battle to send his Legion’s name into history with pride.

  For a moment I heard the howls again. I smelt the rancid ash of unjust fire.

  ‘I will help you,’ I said.

  Lheor looked at me as if I had spoken madness. ‘You’ll help him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Falkus, inclining his head. ‘I knew you would stand with me, Khayon.’

  Why did I volunteer? In time, a great many souls would come to ask that same question. Even Telemachon would ask, in one of the rare moments we could stand each other’s presence for long enough to converse as true brothers.

  And, of course, Abaddon would ask. Though in his wisdom he already knew the answer.

  Lheor was somewhat less sanguine. ‘I want answers, Falkus. How do you know it’s beyond the Firetide? Who’s sending you on this fool’s crusade?’

  Falkus turned to his men and voxed an order. ‘Bring him forward.’

  A lifetime before Falkus and I met in the heart of the storm to speak of his Legion’s extinction, I watched my own bloodline die.

  As a point of parable it was often said that the Thousand Sons Legion died twice, but that is simply poetic delusion. Ahriman’s arrogant Rubric couldn’t kill us, for we were already dead. His failed salvation was nothing more than our funeral pyre.

  We died when the Wolves came. We died when our birth world burned. Prospero, consigned to ash with its shining capital, the seat of humanity’s knowledge: Tizca, the City of Light.

  Imagine a skyline of great glass pyramids, made to honour the beauteous skies, formed to reflect the sun’s light and act as a beacon of illumination visible from space. Picture those pyramids – the spacious hive-spired homes of an educated and enlightened population, committed to the preservation of all lore in the galaxy. The tops of those pyramid-libraries and ziggurat-habitats were antiquated observatories and laboratories, given over to the pursuits of stargazing, sorcery, and oracular divination. We knew those pursuits as the Art, a name many of us still use to this day.

  That was Tizca, the true Tizca. A haven of peaceful learning, not the malformed simulacrum that exists now on Sortiarius.

  We were not innocent, though. Never that. Even now, Sortiarius is home to those of the Thousand Sons who lament their fate, crying up to the Tower of the Cyclops of how they were wronged, how they were betrayed, how they had no way of knowing judgement would come.

  But we should have known. Foolish excuses and mewling whines will never change the truth. We looked too deeply into the tides of the daemonic warp when the Emperor himself demanded we stay blind. We believed then, as the remnant of my former Legion still believes, that the only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance.

  And so, judgement fell upon us. That judgement came to the true Tizca in the form of our feral cousins, the VI Legion – also known as the Einherjar, the Vlka Fenryka, the Rout; and by their basely literal Low Gothic name, the Space Wolves.

  They descended upon us, not on the Emperor’s orders but those of Warmaster Horus. We knew nothing of this at the time. Only later would we learn that the Emperor had demanded we return to Terra under shameful arrest. It was Horus, manipulating the tides of the war before it was even truly declared, who arranged for our censure to become our execution. He wanted us to despise the Imperium. He wanted us – those who survived – to stand with him against the Emperor when we had nowhere else to turn.

  And the Wolves obliged him. In their ignorance, as tragic as our own, they fell upon us. Even now, I do not hate the Wolves. Their only sin was to be betrayed by those they trusted. In that more innocent age, they had no reason to doubt the First Warmaster’s words.

  The Black Legion has its own name for the Wolves. We call them Thulgarach, ‘the Deceived’. Some of us sneer the title, while others say it without mockery. The word itself places emphasis on the cunning of the deceiver, rather than foolishness of the deceived. The destruction of Prospero was Horus’s triumph, not the Wolves’.

  As for the Thousand Sons, I do not know what they call the Wolves, any more. I have little truck with my former Legion and its melancholic overlords. Not since I made my father Magnus kneel before my brother Abaddon.

  But I was speaking of Prospero and its bleak end. On the day the Legion died, I was on the ground when the sky began to weep fire. The first howls we heard were the descent-whines of falling drop pods, comet-streaking their way earthwards. Like most of my Legion, I watched in disbelief as the clear blue heavens above the white pyramids turned black with troop transports. Immense Stormbird landers eclipsed the sun with their reaching wingspans. Smaller gunships streamed around their slower cousins, showing the sick loyalty of flies to carcasses.

  We were not ready. If we had been prepared, the Imperium would have lost two Legions, as we destroyed each other in the bitterest day of battle either we or the Wolves had ever seen. But we were taken utterly by surprise. Our foes had us by the throat before we even knew we were under attack. Our gene-sire, Magnus, the Crimson King, had known judgement was coming
for our sins against Imperial edict. He wished to face punishment as a martyr, rather than resist it as a man.

  Our fleet would have offered a fair fight to the Einherjar armada, but it had sailed to the far reaches of the star system before the Wolves’ arrival, leaving us naked in the sky. The enemy, our own cousins, bypassed our silent and powerless orbital defence array. They dived down untroubled by the inactive citywide laser batteries.

  Word spread across the vox, and from bonded mind to bonded mind. The same words, again and again. We are betrayed! The Wolves have come!

  I will not argue the philosophy behind whether or not the Thousand Sons deserved execution. But I knew what it was to be orphaned by war, bereft of bloodline and brotherhood.

  So perhaps the reason I agreed to help Falkus was so I could stand with this man I admired and help him through the same hollow journey I had suffered. Perhaps I was just lonely aboard my ghost ship – surrounded by ashen dead too mind-scourged to recall our past together – and saw a last chance to fight alongside kindred who deserved my trust. Perhaps the resurrection of Horus was an abomination I could neither tolerate nor risk.

  Perhaps I just wanted the Nine Legions’ flagship for myself.

  ‘Bring him forward.’

  Several more of Falkus’s warriors entered from a side corridor, their gait showing the trained movements of walking in gravity-starved environments despite their unwieldy Terminator plate. Justaerin. Once the Sons of Horus warrior-clan elite.

  Between the five of them they escorted a warrior bound in mag-locked manacles, binding his wrists behind his back. Gold lettering scrawled across his red armour in precise, miniscule runes – each line was a prayer or benediction in a tongue forgotten by the Imperium, which we know as Colchisian.

  Lheor snorted as the prisoner was brought towards us. ‘I admit I wasn’t expecting that.’

  Nor was I. The warrior in the black and rich crimson of the Word Bearers warpriests was forced to kneel before us. His helm was an antiquated thing of dirty bronze. One eye lens was emerald in hue, the other the dark blue of Terran sapphire. I wondered at the significance of such a thing.

  ‘Is this a gift?’ Lheor asked. ‘Or a toy for Khayon’s bloodward?’

  ‘Wait,’ Falkus replied, ‘and you will see.’

  I could sense Lheor sneering down at the captive. For my part, I brushed my senses against the Word Bearer’s mind, feeling the repellent strength of absolute, ruthless privacy. A disciplined mind, no question there, and one possessing psychic potential of its own. But untrained. Loose. Raw. He was not born with a sixth sense. He had developed it as his soul ripened and blazed brighter in the Great Eye’s fertile tides.

  ‘We’re waiting,’ said Lheor.

  We all felt the change in that moment. Lheor looked up sharply, his hand straying to the axe bound to his back. Falkus’s helm clicked with the half-muted exchange of vox messages between he and his warriors, while each of them braced bolters to shoulder-guards in readiness for something as yet unseen. I felt it as a whisper in the still air, a presence moving from one place to another, the way one might feel someone crossing a room even when one’s eyes are closed.

  Mekhari and Djedhor lifted their bolters a moment after Falkus’s men had done so. My wolf was growling at the shadows.

  Something comes, she warned. Or someone.

  No figure appeared in a storm of psychic energy, or burst into existence with the thunderous air displacement of teleportation. While the three of us watched the captive, and while our warriors brought dozens of bolters to aim across the command deck, the corpse slouched on the captain’s throne stood up behind us. The buckles of its restraint belts snapped with rotted ease.

  Lheor and I whirled in the ragged unity of brothers born into different Legions. Mekhari and Djedhor’s boltguns locked on to the standing cadaver. My axe rippled with a live energy field, and the chain-teeth of Lheor’s blade chewed through the airless silence.

  The dead Sons of Horus officer made no hostile move once he had risen from his throne. The corpse carried no weapon and wore layered, ugly Mark V war-plate. A sign of the Heresy, and rushed repairs made between battlefields. It stood there and watched us, as we aimed our weapons at its head. On its pauldron, the open-eye symbol of the Sons of Horus was cataracted by frost.

  I cannot imagine life without a sixth sense, for my talent developed in my earliest youth. It strikes me as a lamentable lack to look at another person, to speak to another warrior, and not sense the ebb and flow of his emotions as you hear his words. The figure on the throne had been a corpse, a creature devoid of any thought and synaptic reaction. That was why I hadn’t sensed any life within it when we entered. There had been no mind, no life, to sense.

  Yet now there was. The faint stirrings of an essence teased me – I sensed its nearness but none of its detail.

  Impossibly, there came a crackle as another signal tuned into our shared vox-channel.

  ‘Brothers,’ the voice came as a breathy, nasty hiss of escaping air. ‘My brothers.’

  ORACLE

  Neither Lheor nor I lowered our weapons. The air shimmered with unformed weakling spirits, caressing our armour with insubstantial hands. Daemons waiting, wanting to be born. I felt their hunger for our soulfires and their wish that we would just commit to violence, granting them life through emotion and bloodshed.

  ‘Name yourself,’ Lheor ordered the standing corpse.

  ‘Sargon,’ came the dry whisper across the vox. The scratchy voice was strained, through effort rather than malice. Neither the armoured suit nor the cold of the sunless void had entirely protected the body from the onset of decay, for the creature’s word was a whisper pushed from rotted lungs.

  The others had no talent in the Art, but I could sense the psychic strings between the moving corpse and the mind animating the thing’s bones. The figure stood before us in a dead-muscle slouch, a puppet moving only at the behest of a nearby master. I lowered my axe, looking to the nearby Word Bearer. ‘You are Sargon.’

  The prisoner’s bronze helm dipped in acknowledgement, but the hissed reply came from the standing corpse.

  ‘Sargon Eregesh, once of the Seventeenth Legion. Once of the Brazenhead Chapter. Once a warrior-priest of the Word.’

  ‘Once?’ I asked. Every warband had a varying degree of loyalty and involvement with their parent Legion, but I had encountered few warriors among the XVII who had cast aside Lorgar’s teachings.

  ‘I bring enlightenment and illumination, but it is no longer the Word of Lorgar.’

  I looked to Falkus for an explanation. ‘Where did you capture him?’

  He shook his head. ‘I didn’t capture him at all. He came to us after Lupercalios fell and surrendered his weapons. The bindings are merely a precaution.’

  And an insult. Even now, Falkus had his primarch’s pride. He’d always been poor at considering the needs and nuances of others. I addressed my words to the kneeling warrior, rather than the puppet speaking on his behalf.

  ‘Why do you not speak?’

  The Word Bearer reached a red gauntlet to touch fingertips to his throat. Again the words came from the upright corpse behind me.

  ‘Wounds taken in the Terran War. I cannot speak. One of Sanguinius’s sons cut my throat. His blade took my larynx and tongue.’

  I sensed no deception from him, but in truth I sensed very little at all. His defences were strong, and not purely through an iron will. He was not simply animating the cadaver as a plaything – his essence was diffused between the corpse and his own flesh, his soul alive in both bodies at once. Such a feat took an incredible degree of control.

  If you were silenced by an enemy’s sword, then why not speak as I speak now?

  Silence answered me. The Word Bearer did not react, nor did the corpse. I tried again.

  Can you not hear my words?

  Still nothi
ng. Gyre prowled the deck below the raised command dais, watching us with hungry white eyes.

  He cannot hear us, she pulsed to me. I see his soulfire as a caged flame. Alive but hidden. There but not there.

  Her cautious confusion was palpable across the bond we shared. I looked back to the kneeling warrior. With almost all living beings, I could sense fragments of their emotions and memories as a chaotic haze around their mind. Looking into their lives took no more than a moment’s thought.

  This warrior’s aura was smoke. Just... smoke. The voices within it were too muted to make out. The colours inside it were bleached of all vitality.

  Someone, or something, had cauterised this man’s spirit. He had been severed from other living beings in a way most mortals would never realise. As Gyre said, he was there but not there.

  ‘Who did this to you?’

  ‘I have already told you,’ said the standing corpse as the Word Bearer touched a hand to his throat again. ‘A Blood Angel.’

  ‘No. Who severed your soul? Who caged your essence away like this?’

  Lheor and Falkus were looking at me as if I were speaking in tongues. I ignored them, waiting for the Word Bearer’s answer.

  ‘I cannot say,’ voxed the dead man. Again I sensed no deception from the captive, but his answer was vague enough to mean anything.

  ‘Cannot, or will not?’

  ‘I cannot say.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Khayon?’ Lheor asked. ‘Who did what to him?’

  ‘His mind and soul are warded beyond anything I have ever seen. I could overpower his will and still not learn a fraction of what he hides in his memory. Someone did this to him, but I cannot imagine who possesses the ability. My brother Ahriman, perhaps. Or my father Magnus.’

  ‘I have met neither,’ the corpse wheezed across the vox.

  ‘Thrilling,’ remarked Lheor, his tone laced with boredom.

  ‘Why did you surrender to the Duraga kal Esmejhak?’ I asked.