The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘They are near.’

  ‘You lie. You are the only two soulfires of worth here.’ Its smile was a peeling-back of its lipless maw from cracked yellow fangs, as it gestured a claw towards me. ‘The man that would be my master, still shackled in memory, iron and hate.’ The talon drifted, aiming at Lheor. ‘And a man with a pain engine in his skull, collared by the Messiah of Blood.’ Amusement rippled from the thing in waves of hot pressure. ‘Such mighty warriors.’

  I let its mockery go untouched, casting my senses across the misted bridge. Seeking...

  No. Damn it, no. I felt Telemachon’s essence elsewhere, fleeing through the ship. Laughing as he ran. Accursed coward. He and a handful of his brethren had managed to escape.

  The Ragged Knight closed its claws around a severed leg, torn from a nearby corpse. The creature held the morsel above its open jaws, then dropped it into its waiting maw. Its burning eyes still watched us as it went through another few moments of wet gag-swallowing, opening the muscles of its throat to get the flesh down into its craw.

  The ship rumbled beneath our boots. Were the Emperor’s Children scuttling the wreck or salvaging it? Did they even have a unified plan?

  Sekhandur! came Ashur-Kai’s voice. They are boarding us!

  Hold, brother. Have the Anamnesis awaken the Syntagma. Hold a little longer.

  The conduit is gone...

  Then we will tear open another.

  ‘I have paid you in the blood of traitors,’ I said to the daemon, watching it eat.

  ‘But so few traitors. Such little blood.’

  ‘Is it speaking?’ Lheor asked. He could see its jaws moving, but the smears of guttural syllables it made didn’t resemble human speech. The World Eater’s confusion forced another smile across the creature’s maw.

  ‘You cannot understand my words, adopted son of the War God?’

  ‘This is not the time for this discussion,’ I replied to both of them, still facing the daemon.

  ‘It has been an age since you called upon me, Soulweaver. Why is that?’

  I wouldn’t rise to its bait. ‘There is a warrior aboard this ship, fleeing us as we speak. I will give you his image and his name. Hunt him down. Destroy him.’

  ‘I think... I shall not do as you demand this time, Khayon. I shall eat your meat and drink your soul, and we shall see what happens then.’

  ‘You are pacted to me.’

  ‘If the pact is binding and if you are strong enough to enforce it, then you have nothing to fear.’

  I raised my pistol. Lheor hefted his heavy bolter. I could feel his aching need; he burned to face this thing in battle, to test himself against it and raise its skull high once he’d seen it slain.

  The Ragged Knight laughed at our weapons. If it wanted us dead, it would be on us before we had a chance to fire. I felt my eyes heating, whispers of warpfire flickering there, evaporating the aqueous humours.

  ‘Obey me,’ I said, feeling anger rise in a bitter tide. This thing, no matter its power, was lawfully pacted and bound. I would not be defied by its childish pride.

  ‘Or...?’ It took another step closer. ‘What if I defy you? What then?’

  Back! came a new voice, truly feral, from everywhere and nowhere. Gyre prowled with vicious, animal slowness, stalking from my shadow to stand before the creature. Her claws scraped the deck, leaving talon scars in the durasteel. Just like a true wolf, she hunted in a low crouch, hackles raised, ears flat back to her canine skull.

  ‘The Little Changeling shows itself at last,’ the Ragged Knight grinned wetly down at the wolf. That should give some scale of the daemon’s size. It looked down at a wolf almost the size of a horse.

  Back! Gyre bared her teeth, growling in challenge. Back now, or bleed.

  The Ragged Knight hesitated. Perhaps because of the pact that bound it, perhaps because it sensed the threat of being immolated in warpfire if it took a step closer. But I don’t believe it was either of those things. To this day, I’m certain it was my wolf that kept the creature at bay.

  The Ragged Knight hunched its shoulders, backing down and turning to dine on the freshly dead.

  My wolf, I sent to her. Thank you.

  My master, was her only reply.

  The daemon’s neck rippled with muscle tension, and it casually vomited up a steaming, acid-burned helmet. The helm clattered onto the deck, hissing and faintly bubbling in the returning breeze of air pressure.

  One of the Emperor’s Children still lived, impaled by the daemon’s blade. I do not know if this helpless warrior was the kind of man given to curses, screams or threats, for he had time to do none of them when his life ended. Even Lheor took a step back from the feeding daemon as it tore the legionary into digestible chunks, beginning with the head. We watched it gag and gulp them down.

  ‘Destroy the warrior known as Telemachon Lyral,’ I told the Ragged Knight a second time.

  ‘Master,’ the thing conceded at last. The daemon dropped to its hands and knees once more, vomiting up a second steaming, bile-washed helmet and skull onto the deck. ‘For you, kin-brother.’ The Ragged Knight inhaled and exhaled with the sound of families screaming, and inclined its horn-crowned head to Lheor.

  I translated the growls and sticky snarls for Lheor. ‘It is offering you the skull.’

  Lheor looked at the fleshless skull in the half-melted helmet, then back at the towering, armoured daemon. His face was ruined by twitches and muscle tics. Pain webbed out from his altered brain, but he managed to force the words through his metal teeth.

  ‘Tell your pet, it can keep that one.’

  The Ragged Knight turned, clutching its blade, and its running tread shook the deck beneath us. With a single cleave of its sword, the half-sundered door fell apart in shards. Then it was gone, hunting the image of Telemachon I’d etched across its primitive brain.

  A sense of emptiness lingered in its wake, that hollow-bellied weakness that comes from too long without nourishment. A hunger so deep it makes your bones ache.

  ‘I will reopen the conduit,’ I said, ‘once I have seen Telemachon die.’

  ‘I have to get back to the White Hound.’

  ‘That is not an option, Lheor.’

  He looked at me. I could see the war in his eyes: to stay and fight at my side, or flee back to my ship where he’d be next to helpless.

  ‘Fine. I’m with you.’

  We gave chase.

  Lheor was keener than ever to face the thing in battle. I do not know if he was born without a sense of his own mortality, or if it was hammered out of his brain when the cranial implants were beaten in. He knew the daemon served me, but he still burned to match himself against it, even after seeing what it had done to almost twenty Emperor’s Children.

  We pursued the daemon through the upper decks, with no hope of catching up to something so swift. Gyre led the way, leaping over the strewn corpses of Emperor’s Children lying in dismembered disarray. The wolf was a ghost, never touching a single body, dissolving into the darkness when her way was blocked and leaping from the shadows up ahead.

  Tracking the daemon was no trouble at all. A trail of blood decorated the walls and deck, dried spatter-pools of hardening brass marking where the thing fled ahead of us. The Emperor’s Children were injuring it, and whatever bled could be killed. But the task was far from easy.

  Molten lines of carved metal graced the right wall of several corridors, made by the daemon’s great brass blade ripping through the durasteel as it ran.

  ‘The White Hound is taking fire,’ Lheor voxed as we ran. His tone spoke the words his voice did not. His ship was dying in the void, and there was nothing he could do about it. ‘What of the Tlaloc?’

  ‘My ship lives.’

  ‘Is the vox-link still open?’

  ‘No.’ The simple truth was that I would know and feel the mom
ent Nefertari died. But some secrets were mine and mine alone. ‘I would feel a psychic severance,’ I said. Lheor grunted in irritation. ‘Just say “magic” and be done with it. Cease trying to sound mysterious.’

  Magic. A truly stupid word.

  We passed from the command sector into the primary communal habitation decks. These narrow, labyrinthine corridors and chambers locked together with all the charm of a hive spire’s miniscule living apartments.

  Soon enough, I could hear the dull crashes of that horrendous blade against ceramite armour. The sound echoed through the hallways with the call of a cracked cathedral bell. Again. Again. Again.

  Gyre vanished into a chamber ahead of us, bolting through the open bulkhead. Beyond the open archway lay a triclinium, one of the rooms where the human crew of His Chosen Son once gathered for their meals of protein-rich slop.

  Lheor was still at my side, his emotions rising high. A rippling tide of black fury rolled from his mind, seeping into my thoughts. His anger was intoxicating. The raw, electrical pleasure of it.

  We charged into the chamber together, weapons in our hands. I saw the enemy dead, clad in black and rose, lying in pieces across the deck; on the dining tables; slumped against the curved walls. I saw the Ragged Knight, towering above all, cleaving with its brass blade.

  And I saw Telemachon, the last warrior standing.

  ‘Throne of Terra,’ I said at the sight of him. A curse I’d left behind decades before.

  I have already said that Telemachon’s voice was beautiful – my words cannot do it justice, the low, strong, honey-throated resonance of it – but it is nothing compared to how he fought that day. That was true beauty.

  Poets will often speak of a ‘warrior’s grace’, and the ‘dance’ of a skilled fighter’s footwork. In all my years of warfare, I had never seen the reality of it until I saw him duelling the Ragged Knight.

  Remember that this is a man I despise. We have tried to end each other’s life a hundred times and more across the span of millennia. It grieves me to praise him at all.

  He matched the daemon’s height by standing upon the triclinium’s long tables, deflecting the Ragged Knight’s blows with a sword in each hand. He was beyond a blur, into something liquid and unreal. Both of his blades moved in absolute harmony with one another – he parried, disengaged, blocked and riposted with his swords in mathematically perfect unity.

  His helm’s faceplate is what elevated the moment past the miraculous and into the insane. The handsome silver visage, a young man’s flawless features, looked utterly at peace. Serene. Perhaps even bored.

  It isn’t easy to fight with paired swords, and even more difficult to fight well. Many fighters deceive themselves that it offers any true benefit at all over a blade and pistol, a sword and shield, or a stronger, longer single blade. Duelling with twinned weapons is a common recourse for those who relish posturing over skill, and enjoy the element of intimidation. Few soldiers ever master it even among the Legions, and the sight of a warrior with two blades is almost always the first sign of an overconfident fool.

  But Telemachon made posturing into an art that blended perfectly with his immense skill. He lifted his blades against the overwhelming blows, forced to give ground when anyone else would already be dead. The Ragged Knight had the advantages of strength, of reach, of height, and the swordsman’s only counter was to put everything of himself into every deflection. For several breath-stealing seconds I watched him retreat with savage, furious grace, the blades sparking as they parried the daemon’s swings. He wasn’t just blocking, which would have surely broken his blades. He caught each incoming blow at exactly the right angle, allowing him to crash them aside rather than take the weight of their momentum.

  ‘Die,’ the Ragged Knight was snarling, drooling, at him. Frustration burned off its flesh with the smoke, to have already killed or maimed every other warrior in the room but for this one who remained defiant. ‘Die... Die...’

  In the same moment, my helm’s auto-senses crackled as they tuned into an incoming signal.

  ‘I underestimated you, Khayon,’ Telemachon breathed over the vox, still managing to sound amused through his exhaustion.

  Unbelievably, against reason and rhyme, Telemachon was holding his own against one of the most powerful daemons at my command. Even though it was wounded, the swordsman’s endurance stunned me.

  Then he struck. He actually beat the daemon’s blade aside long enough to strike. Telemachon’s golden swords carved down. An eruption of molten viscera blasted back against him and I think, though I cannot be certain, that I heard him cry out in pain. I would not have thought less of him for doing so, though let me be true to the tale: I could hardly think less of him anyway.

  The daemon staggered, its flesh ripping open. Human eyes stared out in horror from the spreading lacerations; human fingers and teeth and tongues showed in the bleeding slits, clawing to escape.

  Telemachon was down. He’d rolled from the table onto the deck. I saw him clawing at his dissolving armour, pulling pieces free in hissing chunks, before the daemon blocked my view.

  ‘Khayon,’ it breathed my name, ignoring the defenceless swordsman and turning towards me. ‘Enough.’

  Lheor recognised the danger before I did. Perhaps in that moment he recognised a shred of kinship with the creature, some shared bond-thread with the Ragged Knight as another being inexorably tied to the War God.

  Or perhaps arrogance led me to believe that my control could not be threatened and broken so easily. Whichever is true, the Ragged Knight turned from Telemachon, forsaking the killing blow in favour of seeking my life as its next feast.

  ‘I will be free,’ it snarled. ‘By my blade, this pact will end.’

  ‘Hold...’ I warned it. ‘You will hold, daemon.’

  But my words had no effect. They were naught but wasted breath. I should have seen this coming. I had seen it coming. The creature’s unreliable and rebellious nature was the principal reason I was so reluctant to let it loose.

  Lheor’s heavy bolter opened up without my order, the weapon kicking in his fists as he hammered a stream of explosive bolts into the daemon’s ankles. Ichor flew in thick strings, eating into the deck wherever it landed. He fired to cripple the beast, standing in the familiar lean of those who have spent decades as Legion cannon-slingers.

  Gyre launched high as Lheor shot low. With a leap that would have put a Raptor to shame my wolf launched herself onto the Ragged Knight’s back, snapping her jaws closed on the side of the creature’s neck. Bronze chainmail links sprayed away under her claws. Brass blood gouted in a hissing torrent from Gyre’s fangs at the daemon’s neck, running in a molten spill down its arm.

  The warpfire I’d been gathering at my fingertips vanished. I couldn’t incinerate the creature with my wolf in the way. The Ragged Knight roared as she tore pieces from its flesh, and her answer was a rage-maddened stain of red that threatened to infect my senses. I let it come. I welcomed it.

  My pistol gave its kickless drone as I pulled the segmented triggers, three cutting beams of scarlet laser gouging into the Ragged Knight’s abdomen, igniting the flesh around the wounds. I had to keep breaking off to avoid hitting Gyre.

  Its ankles and calves were blasted apart into strands of viscera, but it remained standing. Scorched flesh hung from its musculature in rags, but it kept coming. A great hand closed around Gyre’s throat, dragging the wolf free in a wrenching tear, leaving a mouthful of steaming red flesh in her fangs. Before either of my hearts could beat, the daemon hurled my wolf against the closest wall.

  I remember, with a clarity so pure that I can still smell the smoke, shouting No! into the daemon’s mind, to the chamber itself, to the entire world around us. Gyre crashed against the ancient iron, sinking to the deck in pained shivers, whining as a true wolf would. She tried to melt into the shadows but they coiled around her in sluggish snakes,
answering slower than I’d ever seen before.

  I called the fire once more, its white heat streaming from one hand as my archeotech pistol spat its three cutting beams.

  Nothing. Still nothing. The daemon burned and roared and laughed, and just wouldn’t die. It regenerated and re-grew whatever we blasted, cut, tore and burned from its body.

  In my strain, I instinctively fell back into the ease of silent speech. Fire at its hands, I sent to Lheor. Half of the bolts burst apart in fragments as they impacted against the spinning, twisting blade. Those that punched home against the daemon’s claws did little more than send molten blood spraying in cloudbursts of corrosive slime. Impacts that would disintegrate human flesh scarcely penetrated the daemon’s skin. Its wounds left it slow, but nothing was killing it.

  I’d never tried to destroy the Ragged Knight before. Desperation emboldened me: I reached for it, my hands outstretched as though each fingertip was looped by a marionette’s strings. I felt my senses bite and lock. Then I pulled.

  The Ragged Knight’s head jerked forwards, only for half a moment.

  I pulled again. Its left wrist gave a quick jerk. Its right shoulder twitched with little more than a spasm.

  The others sensed me gathering my focus and renewed their assault. Gyre launched from the floor, emerging from the dancing shadows to sink her fangs into the meat of the Ragged Knight’s thigh. Acidic gore streamed from the thing. The chamber was thick with soul-smoke and the screams of men and women who had died an eternity ago.

  A telekinetic hold wasn’t enough, I had to be inside whatever passed for its mind. My senses plunged into the lake of choking hatred that made up the daemon’s consciousness, and I saw that primitive Franckish city tens of thousands of years before, dying in war’s inferno. I heard the screams of that distant day, all the pain that now served this creature as blood, bones, organs, flesh. I felt the blazing city’s fire licking my skin, just as the flames had killed so many hundreds in Albajensia with its crackling caress.

  I felt all of this, threading myself through the Ragged Knight’s core. I saw the faces of the dead and the dying. I watched their protectors massacring them. I breathed in the smell of the blood, the smoke and the cooking meat of human flesh.