The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Lheor was demanding that very thing. He wished to turn around, and Ashur-Kai refused him.

  ‘It’s not too late. We could fight our way through.’

  ‘We could,’ the albino replied. ‘But we won’t.’

  ‘There are almost fifty warriors on my ship.’

  ‘How exciting.’

  ‘And over ten thousand slaves.’

  ‘What a large number that is.’

  ‘I’m warning you, sorcerer...’

  ‘If you cared for the lives of your men and thralls, perhaps you should have reconsidered your ill-advised mockery of the enemy commander when he offered you mercy.’

  Ah, there it was. His disapproval of me, hidden in a lecture given to another. Forever my mentor as well as my brother.

  ‘Lheor,’ I called across to the World Eater, from my throne. ‘Scowling at the seer will change nothing.’

  The warrior in red turned to me, ascending the steps to the command throne. ‘Fifty men, Khayon. Fifty legionaries.’

  ‘Fifty dead legionaries.’

  He disengaged his helmet’s seals to drag it clear, showing a face riven with ugly stitching. Synthetic flesh patches didn’t quite match the true ebony of his skin, and bronze fangs replaced every tooth in his skull. Metal teeth were common among the World Eaters but I hadn’t seen teeth of reinforced bronze before now. Centuries of battlefield wounds had rendered Lheorvine Ukris into an avatar of patchwork ruination.

  ‘We just need to get close enough to pick up the escape pods.’

  ‘We are not going back, Lheor.’

  ‘How like you,’ he sneered, ‘to show the crease of your arse to the enemy instead of standing and fighting. Running from a fight suits you, son of Magnus. Why break a lifetime’s habits, eh? Just like Prospero, when I found you cowering in the ashes.’

  I looked at him as I leaned back in the throne, saying nothing. In the same second that he hefted his heavy bolter, every single one of the fifty Rubricae on the command deck raised their weapons to aim at the seven World Eaters in our midst.

  Do not fire, I told them. This was getting out of hand.

  ‘You think your corpse-brothers intimidate me, sorcerer?’ His abused features flinched with muscle tics as his cerebral implants bit down. I sensed unborn daemons in the air around him, licking their formless jaws. They feasted on his pain and his rage.

  ‘We are not going back, Lheor. We cannot. Look at me. You know me. You know I would not abandon your kinsmen to die if we could save them. I would even open a conduit to pull them through if I could. Look to the occulus. Your ship is already dead. It died the moment the ambush began. Even if you had reached it at once, it would have changed nothing.’

  The truth of those words was evident enough, as we watched the end of our short-lived fleet. Ships take a long time to die, much as oceanic vessels once took an age to fully sink. As we watched, the Baleful Eye came to pieces without Falkus ever responding to our hails. The Jaws of the White Hound crumbled and burned without us ever responding to theirs. Lheor’s brothers died cursing us for cowards.

  ‘You could try,’ Lheor pressed one last time.

  ‘I have power, Lheor, but I am not a god.’

  He turned away from me, saying no more.

  ‘Terminate the link,’ I said to one of the servitor helmsmen. I was tired of listening to the doomed World Eaters’ ranting cries.

  ‘Compliance,’ replied the cyborg.

  Amidst the melee, one vessel winked out of existence in a sudden flare of migraine light. A warp core breach? A rift, torn in the fabric of the storm’s calm eye? Falkus had no sorcerers of significant power.

  Sargon, though. The prophet. Could it be that he...

  ‘What ship was that?’ I asked.

  Ashur-Kai spoke with closed eyes, relying on his senses rather than the stuttering, flickering tactical hololith.

  ‘The Rise of the Three Suns.’

  Falkus’s newest, most wounded ship. ‘Did it flee?’

  ‘It is gone,’ he corrected me. Which could mean anything at all in the underworld. Swallowed by the storm to be cast across the length and breadth of the Eye. Hurled forward into its own future. Erased from reality.

  The rest of our makeshift fleet proceeded on its way to oblivion. We watched daemons of a thousand shapes and shades crawl into existence around the burning ships, brought forth by rage and terror, feasting upon the doomed crews whose minds had birthed them.

  I turned away. ‘If you wish, we will leave you at the closest Twelfth Legion stronghold.’

  Lheor’s reply was to spit on the deck by my boots.

  After that, our escape was almost shamefully easy. I remained on the command deck, sat upon my throne. Occasionally I tuned into the communal vox-channel, surprised to hear Nefertari screaming. She was still sealed within the Aerie.

  ‘You did not free her?’ I asked Ashur-Kai. ‘You did not let her fight when we were boarded? Brother, are you mad?’

  The albino glared at me, red-eyed and weary. ‘I had more on my mind than freeing your murderess for her own amusement.’ He turned and walked away, his anger a subtle throb against my mind. I could feel an undercurrent of polite, dignified fury. He had wished to speak with Sargon and glean any truths to the Word Bearer’s prophecies, one seer to another. The cobweb of fate fascinated him. He resented me for not handling the meeting as he would have done.

  Gyre came to me, circling my throne before seating herself at my side. Ashur-Kai was back upon his balcony, guiding the ship in tune with the Anamnesis. Lheor and his men had gone wherever they wished; anywhere to escape my presence, it seemed. That left me and my wolf.

  You should not have saved the one Ashur-Kai calls Firefist. He is a killer of kin, and not to be trusted. I see it in his heart.

  I looked at her, once more turning aside from the view of the boiling storm.

  Killing kin is the least of any Legion warrior’s sins. None of us can claim innocence in that.

  Mortal words, she said, and mortal excuses. I speak of blacker, deeper betrayals.

  I know. But I owe him, just as I owe Falkus. The wolf knew just what I owed Lheor. She had been there when Prospero fell. It was her very first night as a wolf.

  Life is more than clinging to old oaths, master.

  That seems a strange thought for a bound daemon to have. I ran my gauntleted fingers through her black fur. The wolf within her growled at the attention. The daemon ignored it.

  A pact is not an oath, she said. A pact is a binding of life force. An oath is something mortals bleat and whine at one another in moments of weakness.

  She was breathing now, something she rarely did. For her, the wolf-shape was one of preference, nothing more. She enjoyed the canine form’s lethality and symbolism, and cared nothing for the details of feigning life.

  Gyre, if Horus Reborn walked the worlds of the Great Eye...

  The wolf shivered as though fighting off a chill. Her silent voice dripped with spite. The unease you feel at such a rebirth is shared among the Pantheon. The Sacrificed King died as he was fated to die. He cannot rise again. His time is gone. The Age of the Twenty False Gods is gone. We walk in the Age of the Born and Neverborn. So it is, and so it must be.

  I was silent as her words took root in my mind. She was apparently in no mood for further contemplation.

  I go, she sent in a low growl, rising and stalking away. Bridge crew shied away from the hulking wolf-daemon in their midst. Gyre ignored them all.

  Where are you going?

  To Nefertari. With those words, she left me staring after her in nothing less than shock.

  Ashur-Kai came to me next. He was still glowering.

  ‘We took prisoners,’ he said, noting it for its rarity. The Syntagma scarcely ever left anything alive. ‘Seven of the Emperor’s Children.’

 
I looked at him for some time before replying. ‘It would have been useful had you predicted at least a shadow of what just happened, seer. A great deal of death and humiliation might have been avoided.’

  ‘True.’ His red eyes radiated measured acceptance of all that had taken place. ‘And it would be delightful if prophecy worked that way. A fact you would know if you had any talent or respect for it. Now where are we going?’

  ‘Gallium.’

  Slowly his thoughts reverted to their stately, passionless procession of analytical considerations. He calculated his responses in conversation the way a cogitator calculated mathematics. Gallium made sense. We would refuel, rearm and repair.

  ‘And after Gallium?’ he pressed. I knew what he was asking.

  Had I decided, even then? Was I committed to springing Sargon’s trap, risking everything on the edge of the Radiant Worlds for the ultimate reward? I honestly do not know. Consideration is not commitment. Temptation is not a decision.

  ‘Give me time,’ I said. ‘I will decide.’

  I felt his silent acknowledgement – but not his agreement. He returned to his observation platform at a patient walk, one hand resting on the pommel of his sheathed sword.

  His regal anger was something I had no patience to deal with. I rose from the throne, but not to follow him.

  I first met Lheorvine Ukris in the ashes of Tizca, several centuries before the failed fleet muster. The World Eaters came to our savaged home world, to see for themselves what the sons of Russ had done.

  The crystal city had fallen, Prospero had burned, and all that remained were the dead and the dying. Magnus, my first Legion’s master, had fled. He, and most of the surviving warriors, fled through the warp to their new haven on Sortiarius. The vast power unleashed in such manipulation had dragged the heart of Tizca with them in their last-gasp exodus. What remained in its wake were the city’s outer districts, laid to waste, with the millions of dead now populating the parks and lining the wide avenues.

  I was not among those to reach Sortiarius with my brethren. I would eventually journey there later, after the war ended at Terra.

  On Prospero itself, I hadn’t fought my way to the central Pyramid of Photep to join Ahriman’s last stand. My destination, while fighting through the burning streets, was the city’s western edge. I had to reach the Boundary Ziggurats, and I had to do it without my brothers, because the Tlaloc was gone with the rest of the fleet. The Anamnesis was aboard, as were those of my warriors who would survive the Heresy only to die in Ahriman’s futile Rubric. Ashur-Kai commanded the Tlaloc in my absence, leaving him far from Prospero when it fell. I was, in every way that mattered, alone.

  And I didn’t make it. My wounds saw to that. I’d suffered crippling wounds once before, in the Varayan ocean, but they were injuries easily healed once I was out of the water. The idea of dying from those wounds had been more a jest than a possibility. They weren’t blows from axes and mauls and bolter shells.

  When I could no longer run, I staggered and limped for the horizon, where the stepped pyramids ascended into the sky. When I could no longer stand, I crawled, and when I could no longer crawl... I cannot recall. Consciousness deserted me, stolen by the splits in my skull and the wounds woven across my body.

  At some point in the timelessness that followed, I remember staring up at the night sky, thinking the stars might be our fleet in orbit, come at last. Darkness came and went in queasy tides – it was daylight, it was night, it was dusk and it was dawn. There was no order to the sky’s changes, at least none that my fading senses could grasp.

  Gyre was gone, fled from me in the hunt for help. I was cold; the genetic enhancements that forced my body to compensate against blood loss were overworked and sluggish. And my guts ached, though with no conception of time, I had no way to know if it was the bite of hunger or the drawn-out agony of starvation.

  I remember feeling my hearts slowing, falling out of rhythm, one beating weaker and even slower than the other.

  ‘This one’s alive,’ said a voice, some distance away. Those were the first words I ever heard Lheor say.

  I thought about that meeting all those years later, as I walked the halls of the Tlaloc, seeking the World Eater and his six surviving brothers.

  They had claimed one of the ship’s armouries as a temporary lair. Slaves from various decks already laboured in servitude, dragged from whatever duties they’d been performing to now work maintenance on the World Eaters armour and weapons.

  Two of the warriors were duelling, using metal stanchion bars they’d pulled from the ship’s walls. Another was sat with his back to a munitions crate, monotonously thudding the back of his head against the iron box. From his pain-washed senses, I felt an almost clockwork sense of mercy: the pain in his skull would recede each time his head struck the crate. He looked at me – his gaze wasn’t the imbecile’s unfocused stare I’d expected; it was a tormented, wholly aware stare. I felt the virulence in that look. He hated me. He hated the ship. He hated being alive.

  Shadows moved around the World Eaters. Weak spirits of pain and madness, drawn to the tormented warriors, drawing closer to birth.

  Lheor was half out of his armour, using stolen tools to get the job done. Like the plate-clad crusaders of the most primitive cultures, it took no small amount of time, and the help of trained slaves, to get in and out of our battle gear. Every plate was machined into place and synced into position in sympathy with those beneath it.

  ‘Give us armoury slaves.’ This was Lheor’s greeting to me, before he gestured to the poor wretches ‘cleaning’ his armour pieces with dirty rags. ‘These ones are worthless.’

  That was because ‘these’ weren’t trained in the technical knowledge necessary. We had few armoury slaves on the Tlaloc any more, since so few of us needed them. Rubricae were hardly capable of removing their armour. Their armour was all they were.

  I said none of this. What I said was, ‘I might consider it, if you asked nicely.’

  He grinned. There would be no asking nicely, we both knew it.

  ‘Falkus made my skin crawl with his shackled seer. Did his ship escape, do you think?’

  ‘It is possible,’ I conceded.

  ‘You don’t sound too confident. Ah, that’s a shame. I liked Falkus, even if he was altogether too suspicious of his friends. Now, what do you want, eh? If you’ve come looking for an apology, sorcerer...’

  ‘I have not. Though it would be courteous for you to at least acknowledge the fact I saved your life.’

  ‘At the cost of fifty of my men,’ he replied. ‘And my ship.’

  His ship was a junkyard frigate at best, and I told him so.

  ‘She may have been a piece of scrapyard dung,’ Lheor said, gritting his teeth in something that could, with a little generosity, be called a smile. ‘But she was my piece of scrapyard dung. Now tell me why you’re really here.’

  ‘For a mortuus.’

  He looked at me – despite the scar-stitched ruination of his features, both of his dark eyes were those he’d been born with rather than augmetic replacements. After raising the scar tissue where an eyebrow had once been, he asked, ‘What...?’ in a tone of honest hesitation.

  ‘A mortuus,’ I said again. ‘You asked why I came to you. That is why. I have come to hear a mortuus.’

  All of them were looking at me now. The duellists had fallen still. The one on the deck no longer pounded his head against the crate behind him.

  Lheor had commanded the Fifteen Fangs for decades, and served as an officer in his Legion during the Great Crusade. He didn’t look to his men for guidance, but I felt the shift of his thoughts as he considered their presence. He knew they were watching him, watching this moment, for how he would react. But I also felt the spidery presence of the machinery stunting his mind. It ticked and kicked against reason and patience, leaching his focus, pushing pain through
his skull instead of thought.

  The silence stretched out. I felt the pain in his head deepen from tics and spark-scratches to a blossoming throb. It made his upper lip curl, no different from a dog’s.

  ‘Skall,’ he said. ‘Gene-seed unrecovered. Aurgeth Malwyn, gene-seed unrecovered. Ulaster, gene-seed unrecovered. Ereyan Morcov, gene-seed unrecovered...’

  He listed them all, name after name. All forty-six of them. He trailed off after he spoke the last – ‘Saingr, gene-seed unrecovered’ – and looked at me with morbid amusement in his eyes.

  ‘I will have their names entered into the ship’s Dirge.’

  The Dirge was a Thousand Sons tradition; other Legions used different names, such as the World Eaters’ Archive of the Fallen, or in the case of the Sons of Horus, the Lamentation. More than simply casualty lists, they were remembrances – rolls of honour, relics for the Legion to treasure. Aboard our vessels, it usually took the form of names and ranks inked upon scrolls.

  ‘In this ship’s archives?’ one of the others asked.

  ‘I will transfer all records to any World Eaters vessels we encounter.’

  ‘Our Legion cares little for recording the dead, Khayon.’

  ‘Nevertheless, the offer remains. But those warriors named now died in the battle that brought us together. We share responsibility. They should be entered into the Tlaloc’s Dirge.’

  The World Eaters looked to one another, then to Lheor. Lheor, who had just relayed a mortuus to me, as Apothecaries in the Legions traditionally relayed them to their commanding officers.

  Something passed between us: an understanding of a kind. Nothing psychic, nothing so crude or obvious. But he nodded in recognition of it, and thumped his ungloved fist on my chestplate in what passed for brotherly acknowledgement.

  ‘Maybe you have a backbone after all, sorcerer. Now get out of here and find us some real armoury slaves. We need our armour tended to.’

  Well done. Ashur-Kai’s voice in my mind. They will be useful to us.

  My reasons are not so cold and mercenary, seer.