The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  At least there is respect implied in the wielding of an enemy’s weapon. I did not keep Saern for so many years after Prospero out of petty spite for its makers; I carried it to war because it was a beautiful, reliable blade. To consign such relics to ruination is a far bleaker insult.

  Saern’s haft was as long as my arm, forged of grey adamantium and marked with acid-etched runes in the Fenrisian Tharka dialect. The symbols told the tale of its first bearer’s rise to his place as a champion among the Wolves, with the spiralling letters relaying dozens of victories against aliens, traitors and rebels during the Great Crusade. I ended that story when I took the axe from his dead hands.

  In the years that followed, I had the haft reconstructed, threaded through with shards of psychically attuned black crystal from a world within the Eye. These ran like veins down the weapon’s length, from pommel to blade. Although their primary use was in remaking the weapon as a focus for psychic release, they also reacted with a certain ‘hostility’ when anyone but me touched the handle.

  The axe itself was a weighty, single-bladed cleaver, its edge curved like a crescent moon. A golden wolf’s head bared its teeth towards the blade’s killing edge; when the axe was activated, the coruscating lightning played across its feral features, seemingly bringing the beast to snarling life.

  I had other weapons – bolters, pistols, blades, even a spear taken from an eldar soul-witch – but I treasured none of them as much as Saern.

  As I cut downwards, the black crystals flared with the chiming song of activation. The blade tore through reality and unreality alike – nothing manifested in the air, no slit of violent energy and shrieking souls. But the cut was there, and I could feel the things distantly on the other side. Their profane hunger. Their acidic needs. Silent, as they sensed their chance at freedom.

  I reached for the invisible slice, senses straining like clawed fingers, and peeled the wound open. Beyond the rip lay absolute black – a black not of nothingness, but of blindness. Mortal senses couldn’t process what lay through the opening. I felt the distant hunger grow much less distant.

  Somewhere, Ashur-Kai waited on the other side. He waited with his sword in hand, next to the similar wound in reality he’d made aboard the Tlaloc.

  The Neverborn spilled through both wounds in the same moment. My brother and I started fighting at the same time.

  THE RAGGED KNIGHT

  ‘Humanity has always looked skywards for its true path.’

  Who first spoke those words? In all the millennia of my life, I have never yet discovered the sentiment’s origins. Perhaps I never will, if my Inquisitorial hosts choose to execute me. However, I suspect they are too intelligent to try. Attempting to murder me will not end well for them.

  My brother Ahriman, whose wisdom was beyond question until he allowed pride to befoul his thoughts, was especially fond of that quote. Before I stood clad in black, when Ahriman and I were brothers in truth rather than merely linked by blood, I would attend his lectures on the nature of our species and the universe we claimed as our own. In our debates he would quote those words, and I would smile because they were so very true.

  Mankind has always sought its answers in the heavens. The first humans looked to the sun, worshipping a ball of fusion fire as a god incarnated in the sky – a deity of light that brought life and banished all fear of darkness with every dawn.

  It is a powerful symbol. Even now, there are primitive worlds within the Imperium’s ever-diminishing borders that worship the Emperor as a sun god. Mankind’s institutions care not how the herds of its human livestock pay fealty to the Emperor, as long as the unquestioning worship and the Ecclesiarchal tithe never cease.

  When the philosophers of those earliest cultures no longer feared the dark, the night sky became a celestial garden where the stars and planets themselves were placed into poetic, arbitrary constellations, and heralded as the bodies of distant gods and goddesses looking down upon humanity.

  All the while we looked up. Seeking, reaching, wanting.

  Do you hesitate when I say ‘we’? Is it wrong of me to place myself and my kind among the various strands of the human genetic cobweb?

  The Imperium betrays its greatest ignorance when it believes those of the Nine Legions, and the mortals who follow us, to be some unknowable, alien species. Knowledge of the warp is just that: knowledge. No change, no secret and no truth can rewrite every portion of one’s soul.

  I am not human. I have not been human since I was eleven years old, when the Thousand Sons Legion took me from my family and reshaped me into a weapon of war. But I am wrought from a human core. My emotions are human emotions, retuned and refined through post-human senses. My hearts are mortal hearts, yet changed; they are capable of immortal hate and immortal desire, far beyond those felt by our foundation species.

  When we of the Nine Legions think of humankind, beyond their obvious use as slaves and thralls and subjects, we see kindred spirits. Not a species to be reviled, but a weak, ignorant herd that must be guided through sovereign rule. Humanity is a state of being that forms our roots. Not our enemy. Just a step beneath us on the evolutionary coil.

  So, yes. I say ‘we’.

  Over time, mankind looked to the heavens for knowledge rather than matters of faith. These early civilisations evolved past worshiping stars, turning now to the planets orbiting them. These worlds were a promised land of hopeful expansion. Humanity catalogued them, imagined sailing the black skies in ships of armoured iron to colonise them, and eventually sought life upon them.

  Still we sought more. And soon enough, we found it.

  The warp. The empyrean. The Great Ocean. The Sea of Souls.

  When mankind first discovered the warp, using it to travel unimaginable distances, we knew so little of the malevolence that dwelled within its eternal tides. We saw alien entities – these inhuman creatures formed from the aether – but never the malice behind them, nor the great and malignant intelligences that gave birth to them.

  We saw only a reality behind our own, an ocean in constant flux, that nevertheless made journeys of centuries achievable in mere weeks. Distances that would have taken a hundred generations to cross were possible in a matter of months. Shielded in Geller fields, impenetrable bubbles of material reality, humanity’s first empyronauts took our species to the farthest stars and the worlds that spun in their alien light.

  We had no idea. In those days of halcyon ignorance, we had no idea we were sailing through Hell. We had no idea what swam within those tides, waiting for our emotions to give them shape.

  The denizens of the warp have uncountable names across uncountable cultures. I have heard them named as the Soulless; as the Ten-Gu; as Shedim; Dhaimonion; Numen; as geists, wraiths, daevas; as the Fallen; as the Neverborn, and a world of others. Yet all of them, across ten thousand cultures, echo the same ontological core.

  Daemon.

  The moment I wrenched the rift open, Mekhari and Djedhor opened fire in perfect unison. The barks of their bolters were rendered silent on the airless command deck, but the guns bucked in harmony from the recoil-kick inherent in this type of weapon.

  The first Neverborn crawled through the conduit into the cold vacuum of reality, and right into a storm of bolt shells that burst their cadaverous flesh apart in thick, wet streaks of aetheric ichor. Although my vision was separated from Ashur-Kai’s, enough of our bond remained for me to sense his own actions: he’d cut the conduit’s exit aboard the Tlaloc’s bridge, which would be a grave threat were he not also guarded by a phalanx of our Rubricae. Their bolters opened up in a withering storm, devastating the creatures seeking to come through.

  I didn’t have rank upon rank of Rubricae at my side, but the first spill of inhuman flesh was weak enough to be held back by Mekhari and Djedhor alone. Gyre was a black blur, a daemon in the skin of a dire wolf, her claws and fangs dripping with dissolving viscera. She tore
into the things with abandon, relishing the slaughter of such weak prey.

  When Imperial scholars preach of daemonkind as a singular horde united against humanity, they speak the falsest words of their lives. Daemons are born into limitless breeds and subspecies, warring against one another far more often than they wage war against mortals. Even those of the same choirs and pantheons will butcher and devour their kindred out of boundless hate, or fight according to the unknowable pacts that bind them. I have seen entire worlds given over to feuding hosts all sworn to the War God. It doesn’t matter that every daemon in the teeming billions was born at the base of his throne. Manifested as lesser shards of their father’s eternal rage, they know nothing but bloodshed. The children of the other Gods are the same, fighting their own wars in their own ways.

  Gyre was bound to me, pacted by oath, blood, and soul. Yet she had been destroying her own kind for an eternity before she willingly leashed herself to me.

  Here, in the heart of the storm, the first Neverborn reaching through the conduit were uninspiring things, scrabbling free and dying to our weapons before they could threaten us. Their stronger kindred would soon stir – drawn to the conduit by my soulfire and the drumming of my beating hearts – but we had time. This was hardly the first conduit my brother and I had cut open.

  The ship shook beneath us. Boarding torpedoes, striking nearby. I backhanded Saern across the head of something with three faces, and kicked the decapitated remains down the stairs.

  I advise haste, Ashur-Kai repeated.

  You cannot be in trouble, I sent. You have a company of Rubricae there.

  I am referring to the battlefleet bearing down on us. The bravado that you and Lheorvine simply could not resist has ensured the enemy will fire on us. If we linger, the Emperor’s Children will catch us. The ship is only six minutes from breaking back into the storm, Khayon. Do you wish to try entering this conduit then? Can we hold it stable in those winds?

  A lecture from Ashur-Kai, even here, even now. Nothing ever changed.

  I am almost ready.

  Something squirmed at my shin. Something made of shivering limbs and bare organs, without discernible eyes. I pulped it with a crushing boot.

  One cannot look directly at daemons. They are creatures born from the emotions and nightmares of mortals, and pulled forth from the immense sentience of opposing Gods. Perhaps more accurately, mortal senses – even those attuned to the daemonic and the profane – struggle to focus on the Neverborn’s incarnated forms. Our minds apply expectation and structure to something that defies understanding, let alone description. No matter how hard we stare, we are still mortal minds seeking to bear witness to something that should not exist.

  At best, this leaves a murky aura around the Neverborn, rendering them as nebulous as a mirage. At worst, and far more commonly, all that can be gleaned from their physical incarnations are a handful of impressions and sensations: a scent, a memory, a sight of something indefinite.

  Red flesh. Pale skin. Fangs. A dry, cinnamon corpse-stink, with a feeling of bladed threat. Eyes that burn in the dark. A sword of black iron that whispers in dead tongues. The shadow of wings, and the reek of feral breath. Claws steaming with the acid kiss of some toxic poison.

  Something leapt at me from the side, a thrashing weight clinging to my faceplate. I had the briefest image of pliant, uncooked meat quivering against my eye lenses, with a tightening of some vile limb around my throat and shoulder.

  With a heaving jerk, it was gone – I heard a too-human shriek in my mind as it was ripped free. A bleeding shapelessness was dissolving in Gyre’s jaws, breaking apart like fading smoke. I turned away to hammer Saern through the spindly trunk of a stick-thin creature that had brittle scalpels for fingers. The axe sent the daemon to the deck in two pieces.

  Thank you, I sent to Gyre. Now go.

  I stay. I fight. I kill.

  Go!

  The she-wolf, her fur made of smoke and black fire, took a running leap at the wound in reality. She crashed against one of the fleshy Neverborn tearing its way free, landing atop it in a frenzy of claws and flashing fangs, and the two of them vanished into the conduit.

  Gyre is through. Ashur-Kai’s voice chimed in my head the moment my wolf disappeared.

  Mekhari and Djedhor were next. Return to the ship.

  Khayon, Djedhor sent back in mindless acknowledgement. Both of them started forwards, firing from the shoulder as they marched into the seething wound. Claws scratched ineffectively at their armour as they waded through the stunted things surrounding them. Before they entered, Mekhari’s last bolt burst open a creature that looked to be made from overlapping rolls of boneless flesh.

  Mekhari is through, Ashur-Kai sent.

  And Djedhor?

  Only Mekhari.

  The conduit shivered in psychic sympathy with my sudden pulse of concern, ripping wider. I could see the boiling blackness through the slit in reality, and I could feel Ashur-Kai distantly on the other side. The pyre-smoke smell of stronger daemonflesh filled my senses. Not long now. Not long at all.

  What of Djedhor?

  Still no sign, Ashur-Kai replied. The ship is taking fire. We have no time for your idiotic sentimentality.

  But I couldn’t go. I had to keep the conduit open. It pulled at my attention, leaching my focus and slowing my reactions. Keeping it open was an effort of concentration no different from fighting while carrying a heavy burden. I had to remain; the moment I entered it, it would close.

  But Djedhor–

  He is a single Rubricae, Sekhandur. Move!

  Instinct almost had me obeying him. It was one of our Legion’s traditions to pair young sorcerers with veteran masters, as well as encouraging the creation of informal covens of likeminded scholars and loyal apprentices. Ashur-Kai had been my mentor before he was my brother. He had been one of those most devoted to guiding me in learning the Art, but I was no longer his pupil sworn to heed his every order. I had been the ranking officer before the Heresy, and the Tlaloc was my ship.

  I am not leaving him. I will hold the gateway for Djedhor. As will you.

  Saern cleaved through a shrieking something made of bleeding glass. What passed for its blood drenched my armour in patterns that would likely mean something of astral significance to seers like Ashur-Kai.

  Before my former master could reply, Djedhor burst back through the conduit, wreathed in a seething mass of coiled, drowned-looking flesh that wrapped every limb, every joint, even blinding the lifeless glare of his eye lenses. Mouths bloomed open on the creature’s prehensile skin, slavering uselessly against the Rubricae’s armour, but pressure cracks vented dusty air where the thing’s grip splintered the ceramite.

  I couldn’t hack it clear without hitting Djedhor. I couldn’t shoot it for the same reason. My pistol was a heavy-bore Kjaroskuro laser weapon forged long before the Heresy. If I fired the three-barrelled firearm at the creature, it would ignite and take Djedhor with it into incineration.

  Another vent of dusty air gushed free, this time at Djedhor’s throat. I had to risk diverting my focus from the conduit, even if only for a second.

  When I say we call psychic mastery ‘the Art’, I am not seeking to lionise those who carry the gift, or inject sorcery with undeserved mystique. It is a craft like any other, requiring study, practice and tuition to begin, and needing constant effort to gain proficiency. True control requires ritual work, or the careful blending of several disciplines to weave the energies into material reality. But the most basic and imprecise unleashings require little training. To reach, to pull, to burn. These things can come naturally to even an untrained soul.

  I didn’t weave in that moment, nor did I reach, as I so often did with my senses. I pulled, with the bluntest use of telekinetic force.

  I tore the amalgam of tensing flesh from my brother’s body, ripping it from him with a violent heave of
telekinesis. It left most of its severed, quivering limbs on Djedhor’s armour. I allowed it half a heartbeat’s span to thrash in the air, shuddering and seeking to leap at me, before a wave of my hand sent it bursting against a control console in a zero-gravity cloud of crystallised blood bubbles.

  Get back to the ship, I pulsed to Djedhor, standing over him, defending him long enough for him to rise again. A tide of daemonflesh spilled across the deck, disgorged from the spreading conduit. The creatures were growing in size, stronger denizens of the warp making it through the longer I held the gateway open. I buried my axe in the gullet of something lithe and insectile, pitying whatever nightmare-struck mind had given it form. Djedhor made it to his feet, still venting dusty air from his throat.

  ‘Sorcerer,’ came a voice over the vox, scrambled by distortion.

  ‘Lheor?’

  ‘Khayon.’ He was breathless, fighting, killing, running. ‘They’ve burned our gunship. Can you get us out of here?’

  In my distraction, as I’d concentrated on Djedhor and the rift gushing its unwanted gifts of daemonic flesh, I had tuned out of the shared vox-channel. Lheor’s voice dragged me back to it, refocusing me on the wider battle. I confess I had abandoned the World Eaters and Sons of Horus for dead the moment they fled from the command deck.

  I will not belabour the point – the Emperor’s Children had a blade to our collective throats, and His Chosen Son was soon crawling with warriors of the III Legion. It is easy to look back with cold calculation on Lheor and Falkus’s thwarted escapes, especially when I knew I could open a conduit to retreat without caring about the lone Storm Eagle gunship we abandoned in the western tertiary hangar.

  ‘I can get you to the Tlaloc if you return swiftly.’

  Lheor was first, his armour bearing an aura of trailing blood-gems in zero gravity. He flew back into the bridge chamber, the teeth of his chainaxe spinning without sound. Several of his men followed in the same ragged drift, haloed by crystals of blood and squeezing the triggers of revving chainswords.