The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  I braced. I curled my fingers closed, and once more, I pulled. The daemon’s flesh started to split and crack further, showing the blood-smeared human faces beneath its skin. They screamed through the tearing wounds, adding to the tortured chorus. Again and again I tore at the thing’s thoughts, ripping them from its mind, fighting the pain of my own boiling blood.

  The Ragged Knight crashed to the deck in a thrashing blur of golden gore, ichor flooding from the cartography of its injuries. It defied me yet again by scrambling on all fours, moving into an animalistic crawl and shrieking as it clawed its way towards me. Nothing mortal could move like that. Even its prehensile tongue slapped onto the floor, joining its taloned hands in dragging itself nearer. Its physical form was decaying, breaking apart through injury and encroaching banishment, but it was slipping back into a thing of shapeless spite before it allowed itself to die.

  Gyre landed on its back again, tearing hanks of muscle from its shoulders. Lheor dropped his bolter, drew his chainaxe and sparking it into life hurled it at the daemon. Its serrated teeth tore into the side of the daemon’s skull, chewing in deep with a messy howl of carrion-clogged mechanics.

  The Ragged Knight crawled closer, hunched and screaming where once it had stalked and roared. It didn’t strike, it was too far away for that, instead it lifted its sword as a spear, intending to hurl it at me before I could completely unravel its corporeal form.

  My hands were curled into claws. My mouth was a wall of grinding teeth. My thoughts were lost to the chorus of shouts and shrieks and screams that had first given life to this thing crawling before me. With everything I had left, mind and body alike, I pulled.

  It didn’t expire as a mortal, with a sigh and a stilling of its limbs. It came apart with the sound of ripping leather and one last howl of lament. The sword tumbled from its dissolving fingers, crumbling into ash and scattering in a wind none of us could feel. Metallic blood gushed, hardening into a brass lake before it could burn through into the deck. The Ragged Knight’s bestial face formed within the hardening metal, its features whispering up from the floor.

  ‘Khay... on...’

  And then, at last, nothing.

  I was down on one knee without realising when I’d fallen there. Breath sawed in and out of me; it felt like I had to fight for every gulp of air or risk never tasting it again. Gyre stalked to my side and collapsed next to me, giving a wolfish whine. Every inch of her dark coat was crusty with dried brass blood, but the corrosive ichor had no other effect on her physical form. I scratched behind her ears.

  ‘That was educational,’ Lheor said. He was catching his breath while reloading his heavy bolter with almost hilarious calm.

  I was drawing breath to reply when the biting hiss of dissolving ceramite broke through to my senses again.

  Telemachon. He was down on his knees, hands shivering with nerve damage, one fist still clutching a golden blade. Stinking steam rose from his melted, pockmarked armour and his dissolved flesh.

  ‘Forgot about him,’ Lheor’s throaty laugh was breathless over the vox. ‘He isn’t so pretty now.’

  ‘Stabilise him,’ I said. ‘If you can.’

  ‘What? No.’

  ‘Do as I say, Lheorvine.’ I saw a sudden opportunity in taking him alive. Something I wished to try.

  The World Eater didn’t argue. He wanted to but he held his tongue; the balance of power had shifted between us now that I was his only way off this ship.

  When we drew near, Telemachon looked up at us with what little was left of his face. Although it was impossible, his eyes were clear and undamaged, and startlingly blue. He looked unerringly at me, right into my gaze, and gave a candle-wax grin.

  ‘How bad is it?’

  As the ship shook around us, I cut a hole in reality once more.

  ‘Go,’ I said to Lheor. ‘I will hold the conduit open.’ I could sense his unease. He wasn’t gifted at hiding it. ‘It is no different from teleportation.’

  He didn’t thank me – in our time as brothers, receiving thanks from Lheor was an event rare enough to treasure – but I sensed his secret gratitude beneath the mess of seething rage that made up the World Eater’s implant-poisoned thought process.

  He turned, dragging Telemachon’s unconscious form, and walked through.

  Lheorvine Firefist is through, came Ashur-Kai’s voice. With a prisoner.

  My turn. I clutched Saern with both hands, and walked with my wolf into the clawed nothingness that waits behind reality.

  During the Great Crusade, the Thousand Sons attacked a world called Varayah, a name that seemed to be a corruption or variant of an ancient Induasian god-spirit. This was the name given to it by its original colonists and carried down the generations by its population. We called it Five Hundred and Forty-Eight Ten, being the tenth world brought to Imperial compliance by the 548th Expeditionary Fleet.

  It was a world much like the tales of Old Earth, the Terra That Was, in that its surface was drowned in oceans and teeming with underwater life. Varayah’s cities were defended by laser batteries of a most brutal and severe function, annihilating most of the Imperial Army troop landers and Legiones Astartes gunships that sought to make planetfall. We used drop pods to breach the network of skyfire, but such was the intensity of the aerial defences that even drop pods couldn’t be committed to the atmosphere with any real certainty they would survive long enough to strike land.

  And yet, we had to take the world without annihilating it. Orbital bombardment was used against the anti-air defence array in extreme moderation – not to limit civilian losses, which were considered as irrelevant then as in any Imperial conquest – but to preserve the cities’ industrial value.

  Our drop pod was in the first wave. Mekhari was with me, as was Djedhor, both alive, both breathing, both as loyal as any brother or commander could ask. They were strapped into the restraint thrones either side of me. Our target was the capital city’s harbour district, where those of us in the first wave would cripple the anti-air defences to allow reinforcements from the fleet.

  It sounds clinical to simply say we were shot down during our descent, but that is exactly what happened. The drop pod exploded around us, coming to pieces in the air, letting in the roaring wind as we plummeted. I was on fire, my armour coated in ignited fuel, even as I fell. And it was a long, long fall.

  We plunged into the harbour bay. I crashed into the water with enough force to break my leg in three places, shatter my elbow, break the side of my skull, and dislocate my left hip and left shoulder from their sockets. I should have died. Five of the others did.

  Power armour is immensely heavy and entirely lacking in buoyancy, including those suits built with internal gravitic suspensors. I sank without any chance of treading water, even had I not sustained such injury. My helmet had come free, its seals broken when I struck the surface. That left me breathing water instead of air. Added to this, the promethium stuck to my armour plating with inextinguishable tenacity, still burning as I sank beneath the water’s surface.

  I was genetically engineered with three lungs, and a limited capacity to breathe in poisoned gas, alien atmospheres and even water. There was no fear – at least not as humans would understand it; there was of an edge of shock, of almost laughing relief at the fact I’d survived at all. But with it came the shame of failure, the threat of a mission unfinished, and concern that my injuries were worse than I could sense. Crippled, burning and drowning, at first I was too stunned to summon the Art.

  Stepping into the conduit felt like that. The sluggishness of limbs underwater. The pain of your bones and organs under supreme pressure. Of every sound dulled into meaninglessness, yet somehow sounding like a scream. The sense of drowning while on fire. Of burning while you suck down ice water. Wondering if you will ever see the sun again.

  The conduit was even less stable without me holding it open on the other side. T
he screams sounded more like howls. I waded through clinging, scratching blackness pulling at my throat, my wrists, my ankles, and...

  ...walked right into Lheor’s fist. It cracked against my faceplate hard enough to stagger me and scramble the visual feed running across my eye lenses. I had to pull off my helmet, breathing in the stale, recycled air of the Tlaloc’s bridge, spiced by sweat.

  ‘That’s for lying to me,’ said the World Eater. ‘It was nothing like teleportation.’

  WARBAND

  Thoth’s quill scratches on and on, and I find myself dwelling on thoughts of blood. The blood soon to be shed in this chronicle, and the blood that has run in ten thousand years of battle since the first of us stood alongside the Warmaster in the battle aboard the warship Pulchritudinous.

  Blood never mattered to Abaddon. The old Legions, the old bloodlines, the old legacies... These things meant nothing to him then and they mean nothing to him now. They bear the patina of undeserved pride. To the Black Legion, the other Eight bloodlines are nothing more than defeat masquerading as defiance.

  And no matter what you have heard regarding his tyrant’s ways, he cares nothing for unquestioning servitude among his inner elite, nor does he value loyalty that can be bought. What matters to him, what matters to his armies, are the bonds of brotherhood. In an empire that exiled us, in a haven that hated us, and in the shadows of fathers who failed us, Abaddon offered something new. Something pure.

  Too many of our kind see themselves as nothing more than their father’s sons. They become flawed reflections of their primarchs’ ambitions and ideals, seeing validity in no other way of life. But I ask you the same question I ask them – are you not souls in your own right? Are you merely the generational reflections of the men and women who made you? The answer is simple, because the question is ludicrous. We are all so much more than mirror images of those who sired us.

  Abaddon lived that truth, even back in those earliest days, even before we convinced him to return and take up the mantle of Warmaster. Eventually he would unite thousands of warriors cast in the images of their failed fathers, teaching these lost sons to be brothers instead. He made us look to the future instead of fighting for a past we’d already lost.

  That is when life within the Great Eye ceased to feel like purgatory. The warp-touched void became a haven, and its power promised opportunity.

  I have told you there is a malevolence in the warp, and this is true. But it is not the whole truth.

  When you hear those of us among the ‘Armies of the Damned’ speak of the Gods and their Neverborn children, you are hearing us lie to ourselves. Not for the joy of ignorance, but for the necessity of it. We perceive these things in this way for the solace of sanity.

  The God-sworn – whom the Imperium considers nothing more than unwashed hordes of insane cultists and deluded heretics – preach their malignant masters’ omnipotence. These miserable masses cry of ‘Chaos’ as a sentient evil, and the power within its warping touch.

  Any psyker, be they soulbound to the Golden Throne or ascendant amongst the officer ranks of the Adeptus Astartes, knows the simple truth: that a human soul is a light in the dark. A soul is a beacon in the layer that lies behind reality, and daemons are drawn to such soulfires by eternal, malicious hunger.

  The soul of a psyker, the most valuable prize of all, burns a hundred times as bright.

  Yes, all true. And no, all wrong.

  Do you know what really lies beyond the veil? Can you conceive of what the warp really is?

  Us.

  It is us. The truth is that there is nothing in this galaxy but us. It is our emotions, our shadows, our hates and lusts and disgusts that lie in wait on the other side of reality. That’s all. Every thought, every memory, every dream, every nightmare that any of us have ever had.

  The Gods exist because we gave birth to them. They are our own vileness and fury and cruelty given form, imbued with divinity because we cannot conceive of anything so powerful without giving it a name. The Primordial Truth. The Pantheon of Chaos Undivided. The Ruinous Powers. The ‘Dark Gods’... And, forgive me, I can barely speak that last name without forcing my scribe, the patient and diligent servitor, to record nothing but breathy laughter for several moments.

  The warp is a mirror that swirls with the smoke of our burning souls. Without us there would be no reflection, no patterns to perceive, no shadow of our desires. When we look into the warp, it looks back. It looks back with our eyes, with the life we have given it.

  The eldar believe they damned themselves. Perhaps, perhaps not. Whether they accelerated or heralded their demise is irrelevant; they were damned the moment the first ape-like human picked up a rock and used it to break open his brother’s skull.

  We are alone in this galaxy. Alone with the nightmares of all who have lived and hoped and raged and wept before us. Alone with our ancestors’ nightmares.

  So remember these words. The Gods do not hate us. They do not scream for the destruction of all we hold dear. They are us. They are our sins coming home to the hearts that gave them life.

  We are the Gods, and the hells that we have made are our own.

  We ran from the Emperor’s Children and left the others to die.

  Need I detail the indignity of yet another retreat? The truth, as I’ve promised to give, is that running no longer felt like something to be ashamed of. We ran to survive, to fight another day. We had no greater goal to strive for, no victory worth dying for. We had the breaths in our bodies, and that was all we desired. I have not yet relayed just how I survived the fall of Prospero. I assure you, after that, I would never feel shame at another retreat.

  So we ran. The Tlaloc was advantageously placed from the battle’s beginning, still close to the storm’s edge compared to the Baleful Eye and the Jaws of the White Hound. While the Sons of Horus and World Eaters vessels had drifted even closer to the wrecked hulk to recover their gunships, Ashur-Kai had pulled the Tlaloc back from the confrontation at once, knowing we could rely on the conduit. Only one of the Emperor’s Children vessels had reached us, and the Tlaloc’s guns had dissuaded the vessel from pursuit. We had been boarded, but I saw no evidence of any invaders having reached the command deck.

  Void war plays out in one of two ways. Both are slow, stately, and fought with patience as much as vitriol and fury.

  The first is a performance of cold, calculating distance, where vessels unleash their weapons over unimaginable distances in a display of mathematical beauty. It is rare for Imperial ships to do battle by trading this long-range fire and forego the use of their powerful broadsides, but hardly unheard of. It does not play to the Legions’ strengths, and is not favoured by most Imperial captains who wish to inflict their ships’ full punishment upon their enemies. But, as I said, it does happen. These battles of predictive mathematics and trajectory calculations are an art form in their own right, and can only be won by crippling or destroying the enemy vessel. More often, they end with no real winner, when one side chooses to run.

  While we were meeting Falkus’s captive prophet and surviving the sardar’s ambush, Ashur-Kai had been fighting the second kind of battle. These are conflicts of grinding metal and sore-throated orders cried over the wail of emergency sirens. Hot and hateful running battles of slow-rolling manoeuvres, massed volleys of cannon fire at brutally close range, and broadsides roaring into the void as ships pass each other in the night. Boarding pods knife between the warships’ hulls, pinpricking in fiery impacts of iron against iron. Entire decks given over to weapons batteries shake with the anger of release.

  These battles can be won by destroying the enemy ship, but why waste such a prize? We are speaking of cities in space that cost thousands of lives and millions of hours to create, in specialised dockyards crewed by trained tech-adepts and their armies of thralls, often using technology now lost to the Imperium and its enemies. One does not cast such concerns aside
. It is much more common to desire a foe’s vessel as a spoil of war.

  Much like the Tizcan game Kuturanga, similar to Terran regicide, the victory goes to whichever side kills the enemy overlords. Boarding parties strike for the bridge, fighting their way to the command deck in order to butcher or capture anyone capable of controlling the vessel and keeping it in the fight. We of the Black Legion came to call this Gha v’maukris, ‘spearing the throat’.

  As ever with Legion void battles, the defence of the Tlaloc had come down to boarding actions, and that suited us all too well. I had sold my skills to many other warbands through the years, to the Mechanicum and every one of the Nine Legions at one point or another, and I always demanded specific terms of payment. On rare occasions I would settle for precious lore. But never gold, never slaves, never ammunition. I most often took payment in the cold iron currency of Martian war machines.

  These we bound to the Anamnesis’s consciousness, letting her control the metal bodies of a horde of battle robots. No enemy boarding the Tlaloc in battle had ever left it alive. We called this destructive hive-mind the Syntagma.

  I sat in my throne upon the central dais, leaning forwards to stare at the occulus while the ship shook around us. Three of the cyborged thralls at the void shield platform called out reports without looking away from their calculation table. The shields were holding. We were too far from the main fight, and the bulk of the Emperor’s Children fleet was committing itself to finishing off Falkus’s ships.

  But the boarding action had slowed us, as had Ashur-Kai holding course while waiting for me to enter the conduit. Three destroyers, each one alone a match for the Tlaloc, were bearing down on us. Their fore-weapons streamed through the void, and we ran ahead of them, shields flaring hot, seeking to raise the Geller field before we launched back into the storm. They wouldn’t catch us now. Not unless we did something foolish.