The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Lheor looked to his brothers and showed his bronze teeth in an unpleasant smile. ‘We will stay. For now.’

  None of them argued.

  ‘Two things,’ Lheor said. ‘What do you plan to do with Telemachon?’

  It was a little late for secrets. As far as I was concerned, the mortuus had sealed our alliance.

  ‘I plan to do something unpleasant to him.’

  The World Eaters shared grunting chuckles. ‘And what’s that screaming over the vox?’ Lheor asked.

  ‘That is my bloodward. I will deal with her now.’

  BLOODWARD

  The Aerie’s heavy bulkheads remained closed, sealing in a scent almost thick enough to see. The sour mash reek of spoiled meat overlaying rot, a stench revolting enough to make mortal eyes water. Behind the locked doors lay only darkness.

  I didn’t see and scent this myself. I lived it through my wolf’s senses.

  Gyre greeted the stinking nothingness with a growl. The wolf’s snarl was an ungentle one, rumbled through curved, spit-dry teeth. The greeting, such as it was, was swallowed by the artificial night.

  The Aerie’s bound doors had been no obstacle to the wolf. Passing beyond them was nothing more than stepping into shadow on one side of the iron bulkhead and emerging into the blackness on the other side.

  Why are you doing this? I asked her. Insofar as her kind could possess any notion of gender, Gyre was ostensibly female. It was a reflection of the body she’d adopted, rather than any conscious decision.

  I go to her, the wolf sent back, because I can. And with that, she started her ascent.

  It hadn’t always been called the Aerie. That was Nefertari’s doing. It had changed, as so many things had changed, with her arrival. Before the alien had joined us, this chamber had been a mass-transit elevator shaft, large enough to carry battle tanks and great munitions loads between decks. After Nefertari’s arrival, the Tlaloc’s crew soon learned to use other elevator platforms. This one stood in deactivation, cold and hollow, all power killed from its systems.

  Gyre and I were used to sharing senses as one of the principal virtues of our bond, yet I sensed a disquieting pressure from her mind, as she sought to conceal her motives from me. That was when I realised she’d been here without me before. Perhaps more than once.

  More than a dozen times, she replied.

  I was not aware.

  There is more to my existence than my bond with you, master.

  Gyre looked up. A half-kilometre tunnel stretched out above, all the way to the ship’s spinal battlements. Old cabling and gothic carvings made the shaft outwardly skeletal, a vertical passage of ribbed walls pockmarked by the staring black eyes of a thousand open access tunnels. The same view greeted her when she looked down. The shaft descended much further into darkness. She’d entered the Aerie near its apex.

  Gyre’s vision wasn’t the red-stained overlay of Space Marine targeting lenses, nor was it the dull-coloured haze of human sight. She saw souls as flickering fire, and she saw contoured nothingness everywhere else.

  Nefertari, the beast sent into the darkness, though my bloodward was as good as deaf to all silent speech.

  The numerous open bulkheads leading from the long tunnel to the rest of the ship meant Nefertari could be anywhere – she claimed the entirety of the Tlaloc as her playground – but Gyre knew where to hunt.

  The wolf burst into a short sprint, leaping off the platform and into the tunnel. One moment, she was falling through the blackness of ever-present shadow. The next, she stalked from the darkness a hundred metres above, claws scraping on the cold metal of the higher platform. Launching herself into shadow again and again, Gyre continued her rise.

  After five minutes, she found the first bloodstain. After another three, she found the first body.

  Why do you go to her? I asked the wolf.

  She was dismissive. You cannot guess?

  She nosed briefly at the dead body. The kill was far from fresh. An older corpse, one of Nefertari’s discarded playthings, chained to the wall and hanging by its ankles. The body’s last gasp was written plain in pain across its contorted, grey features. My bloodward had pulled its teeth out and carved alien runes across its flesh, all while it was still alive. While it was still a he, not an it.

  To Gyre’s senses, the cadaver was scarcely different to the chains that bound it, or the wall that held it. It was soulless, and thus of no interest. Looking through the wolf’s eyes for too long often bred greasy, heavy headaches that threaded their way through my skull. I could feel another one already beginning.

  More bodies hung above. Nefertari had a habit of chaining several victims in the tunnel to hang at the same time, their cries echoing through the dark avenue down the ship’s backbone and into the Tlaloc’s iron bones beyond. She called it her music.

  Of course, she didn’t need to climb up and down as the human crew did. She could hang her victims in the long tunnel pit and take them to pieces at her leisure, without needing something as mundane as handholds.

  Some of the bodies were human, others lost in the mutable states between purestrain humanity and whatever the warp intended for them to become. Six of them – and these were the ones Gyre climbed past with a fraction more curiosity than any others – were warriors of the Legiones Astartes. Captives from old raids, given to her as sustenance.

  One of them stared at my wolf with eyes of rotting grey. Gyre stalked into the nearby shadows without bothering to sniff the body.

  At last, she padded silently from the darkness at the top of elevator shaft, into the true Aerie. The vast domed chamber was sealed by external scute-shielding. The dense, scaled armour plating blocked all sight of Eyespace outside. The only light in the chamber was that which Nefertari allowed. Tonight, all was dark.

  Gyre prowled, her senses drifting left and right across the tables that were really racks, and over the walls of a chamber that was really a prison. She looked up, at the gargoyles and grotesques clinging to the bony architecture and leering down with silent roars and disapproving scowls. A horde of dark stone effigies, displeased with the wolf’s presence.

  She couldn’t see Nefertari. She couldn’t smell her. She couldn’t sense her. Everything was flesh-rot and blood-stink, but Gyre could hear wounded-animal breathing nearby. That was a start. The wolf walked on, hunting, seeking.

  Be careful.

  You know nothing of what you speak, master. She will never harm me.

  Soulfire rippled on one of the racks ahead – a flickering white aura, stained with vibrant veins of fear. A human, piteously weak and begging breathlessly for help as it lay shackled to a table. It reeked of blood and sweat and shame, just as its aura shimmered with veins of lingering agony. It was wearing the remnants of an enginarium deck uniform.

  Gyre crossed over to the prisoner, watching the human shiver in the cold air. The man called out wordlessly, reaching with what remained of his hand, and the wolf snuffed over the human’s open wounds. Internal bleeding. Ruptured organs. Whoever he had been, the wounded man was too far gone now to be of any use.

  The beast stalked in a slow circle, instinct overriding its own reassurances now that she walked within the feeding ground of another predator.

  Nefertari was near. Threads of sympathetic connection trailed between the prisoner’s pain-wracked aura and her own fiery soul, deeper in the chamber. They shivered like cobweb strings, faintly alight with soulfire.

  Gyre walked on, following the psychic spoor of souls joined by torment. As she weaved between the tables, hanging chains brushed against the muscles of her back and shoulders.

  There, a feather on the deck. She nosed at it – the feather was neither black nor grey, but a dusty charcoal darkness between both.

  Soulfire burned weakly in the greyness ahead. Diminished, drained. That was why the wolf hadn’t sensed my bloodward right away. N
efertari was dying.

  My blood ran cold at the sight of her. Nefertari lay on her front, head tilted so her temple rested against the deck. She looked as though she’d been cast to the ground and left there to die – a thing of lifeless limbs, haloed by a pool of dark hair.

  As the wolf drew closer, the unearthly reek of alien flesh filled Gyre’s senses. That frosted metal stench of too-white skin, layered over the spicy richness of hot, inhuman blood. I felt the ache of bitter saliva stringing between the wolf’s fangs. Nearness to any living being stirred Gyre’s hunger.

  The alien twitched, lifted her head. Pointed ears, dark wings and slanted eyes were the most obviously fey elements of her inhumanity, but everything about her bled that sense of uneasy wrongness one always sees in the imperfection of alien life. Even down to the way she moved: Nefertari was too fluid in her movements, graceful in a way that became sinister, making my skin crawl.

  My bloodward’s eyes were the black of cloudless night, but Gyre’s inhuman perception registered little more than the embers of soulfire behind Nefertari’s glassy stare. One of the alien’s wings rippled with the sound of a turning page.

  ‘You.’ Nefertari’s dead blue lips curled in an anaemic parody of emotion. Her voice was the hiss of a blade being drawn.

  Gyre couldn’t reply aloud. The wolf’s jaws weren’t made for mortal language.

  Blood trickled from the alien’s teeth as she raised herself on trembling limbs. Her wings closed against her back, shivering as they folded. Here was an intimacy between them I could never have predicted. Of all the souls aboard my ship, surely these two should most revile each other. I’d never felt anything but cautious disregard between these, my sisters, my favoured servants.

  The wolf still approached in its silent stalk. As its fanged maw brushed the alien’s shoulder, Nefertari reached out with trembling fingers, embracing the beast’s neck.

  ‘I thirst,’ she whispered. ‘None of these worthless lives matter. Their souls are weak, and their pain is meaningless. No matter how many I kill, I still thirst. But we could kill Ashur-Kai. You and I, Gyre. We could kill Ashur-Kai. Khayon would forgive us.’

  The alien’s forehead was against the she-wolf’s fur, now. They were close enough to share silent speech, even with Nefertari’s stunted senses.

  No. Gyre’s silent tone was something between a canine snarl and an ursine growl. Our master needs the White Seer.

  ‘He would forgive me.’

  Yes, Gyre allowed, and I sensed my wolf’s irritation that I rode her senses through what should have been a private moment. Khayon will forgive you anything. That does not make it wise to kill the White Seer.

  Nefertari was silent for a time, holding to the she-wolf. I sensed... What exactly did I sense? The communion between them made no sense to me, but it was there, and it was real.

  ‘Where’s Khayon?’

  He was with the one called Firefist. Now he prepares to join us.

  ‘He sealed me in.’

  He had to seal you in, after your soul-hunger last time.

  The silence returned. This time it didn’t just linger, it reigned, lasting several minutes. Neither of them broke it. That honour belonged to me.

  The air burst apart in a spray of shrieking light, hitting with a thunderous displacement of wind. Thwarted souls cried out in that tempest. I felt the desperation of invisible hands reaching out from the roaring gust, clawing at Nefertari’s skin and hair with howling, mindless need. Oh, how they wanted her. The Neverborn children of the Youngest God always wanted her.

  They ceased at once, with the same sonic boom that had heralded their arrival.

  ‘Nefertari,’ I said, making the word a greeting and an apology.

  For a moment, I saw myself through Gyre’s eyes: a towering silhouette, crowned with a sunburst halo of corrosive golden light. The threatening headache bloomed fully into something hot and hateful behind my eyes.

  The alien maiden’s only greeting was a cold stare.

  ‘Are you well?’ I asked her, for want of something to say.

  ‘I thirst,’ she hissed at me, releasing the wolf’s neck and rising to her feet on weak limbs.

  ‘I know. We are sailing to Gallium. Distance from the core will ease your torment. Ashur-Kai should have freed you to hunt and drink when we were boarded.’

  ‘I thirst,’ she said again. Had she even heard me?

  I stepped closer. My helmet crest of banded cobalt and burnished bronze cast a deformed shadow on the dark iron deck.

  ‘Nefertari...’

  ‘I thirst,’ she whispered the words that time, rather than hissing them.

  ‘I will give you any of the crew. And we have a handful of Emperor’s Children prisoners.’

  She spat back a denial to my offer. ‘None of them matter. The meaningless pain of insignificant souls. This deep in the Gravebirth... I need more, Khayon. Give me Ashur-Kai.’

  ‘I cannot do that.’

  ‘You can.’ She bared her teeth in something that wasn’t a smile. ‘You can, but you won’t. You choose to deny me.’

  ‘Phrase it however you wish,’ I replied. ‘Gyre, move away from her.’

  Their secret intimacy had left me curiously uneasy. The wolf obeyed, padding to my side, but the beast’s reluctance was clear, and in that moment I hated them both for it.

  Nefertari was dying this time. I could see that as surely as my bloodward was feeling it. The syncopation of her heart was a sickened snare. I could hear it failing to keep its beat, flickering in her chest with staccato wildness. She’d passed the point of pain, past even agony. This was torment, and it saturated her flesh and bones, throbbing to her core. Her wings looked as though they’d been shedding feathers and attracting flies for days. The veins beneath her translucent skin stood out as black cracks through unclean marble. Her slanted eyes, usually so fierce and focused, were glassy and vague.

  She couldn’t die without my permission. But she could suffer enough that I would allow her to die, in the name of whatever mercy remained in my heart.

  It hurt to see her so weak. The storm’s closeness was anathema to her; nearness to the Youngest God was stealing the life from her body, hour by hour. It made the Eye the worst hiding place imaginable for one of her kind – yet also the best, for her kindred would never willingly follow her. And she had a hundred reasons to hide.

  Here was my Nefertari, a creature from a cursed breed. Her race no longer had any place in the galaxy.

  She spread her wings, preparing to leap up and take flight back to the gargoyles above.

  ‘No,’ I told her. My outstretched hand closed in a slow purr of knuckle servos. As telekinetic nothingness pulled at her ankles and wrists, binding her to the ground, the alien maiden thrashed and cried out in protest.

  Binding her body was child’s play. Harder by far to manipulate her mind. Nefertari’s psychic deadness meant I had to sacrifice subtlety for brute force, and she was one of the few souls in the galaxy that I had no desire to harm more than necessary. She was, after all, my bloodward. I owed her my life countless times.

  I pushed aside the twin distractions of Gyre’s accusing stare and Nefertari’s cries, focusing on the infinitesimal psychic manipulation inside her mind. Sweat trickled down my spine, adding to my irritated lack of focus. These miniscule applications of psychic manipulation didn’t come naturally to me. My talents lay along more violent paths.

  I threaded my sixth sense through her thoughts of helpless wrath, pushing past surface rage and deeper pain, past all emotion and memory, seeking the inner workings of her inhuman brain.

  And... there: the strands of bioelectrical force that linked consciousness to muscle. Thousands of them, tying the brain to the rest of her body. It would have been easy to sever them with a blunt push of thought. Instead, I massaged them closed with unseen fingers. A pressure here, a rel
ease there.

  Her heart slowed. Her eyes closed. She tumbled to the deck – a puppet of cut strings and malnourished limbs – and I lowered my hand in slow relief.

  This artificial slumber wouldn’t hold for long. I had to quench her thirst. She needed pain, she fed on suffering. Others had to bleed so that she would live. Nothing else ceased the haemorrhage of her soul into the void.

  Truly, there is no more miserable, Gods-cursed race than the eldar.

  ‘I want her fed when she rises,’ I said aloud. Gyre watched me without blinking. She never blinked. ‘I will have the Rubricae drag thirty slaves to the sacrum-level entrance and leave them there in bindings.’

  It is the storm. A violent nexus, in the Youngest God’s gravebirth.

  I glanced up at the scute-shielding hiding the void from sight. I could hear it, the screaming of lost souls as the ship ploughed towards its destination. And I could sense it, feel it, because some threats were impossible to ignore. The storm we navigated was something from mythic nightmare. The God that destroyed her race leached her life, calling for the soul It was owed.

  You risked warp-walking, Gyre pressed. Here? Now? In this storm?

  I looked at the circling, stalking wolf. The creature eclipsed most natural wolves in size, just as it failed to match them in countless other details. It could have swallowed a child whole.

  I was hardly going to unseal the Aerie and risk her escaping, I replied. Never again. It had taken three days to end the last massacre. Why are you here? What is this secret intimacy between you both?

  Are you so blind to the needs of your devoted few?

  Evidently I was. Then enlighten me.

  I am the only life aboard this ship whose pain will never sustain her. When she thirsts, my nearness does not fuel her torment. And she is the only mortal that I am forbidden to destroy. When I hunger, her closeness offers no temptation.

  I wondered how much of this was the wolf in Gyre’s heart, rather than the daemon in her head. The beast sounded almost as though she spoke about a packmate.