The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  She felt my curiosity across our bond and snapped her jaws closed with a snarling crack.

  Do not mock me. Your blood would taste very fine, sorcerer.

  That, my beloved wolf, is a taste you will never know.

  HALO

  I have grown used to the sound of Thoth’s pen scratching on parchment. It has become the background murmur to what is now my life, just as the constant thrum of Tlaloc’s great engines had been, long ago now.

  After the Tlaloc, there was the Vengeful Spirit. And after that, the Krukal’Righ, known to the Imperium as the Planet Killer. Each of them had their own mechanical song that became, in a way, a soothing sound. Soon we will reach the part of this chronicle where we walked the decks of the Vengeful Spirit. Those are good memories. Times of unity. Times of brotherhood.

  My captors came to me last night. They came with questions, no doubt born from the recollections I’ve given them so far. The first thing they did was speak a long list of names and titles attributed to me – to my deeds, to the massacres committed by the armies that march beneath my banner. They spoke in a series of solemn voices; those rendering judgement were male, female, young, old. The absolute sincerity of their tones was all that united them.

  They reeled off hundreds of titles. Hundreds. How many centuries has it been since my real name was spoken aloud by anyone in the Imperium?

  A sobering thought.

  When my captors spoke their screed of titles, I’d heard most of them in some form before. They were the curses my enemies shouted up at the sky, from the rubble of cities burned by my warriors. They were the names spoken in prayers, wards and blessings by unarmed innocents in the hope I would never manifest from the dark, like some monster of myth.

  Some of the names were descriptive to the point of melodrama, grand beyond reckoning, while others were notable only in a single city or a lone world. Many of them – and these were the ones that made me smile – were for atrocities committed by my brothers’ armies, on my brothers’ orders. Almost a dozen of the listed massacres took place on worlds I have never visited. Three of them ravaged worlds I’ve never heard of.

  Questions followed, delivered in the measured tones of those used to getting answers. These men and women had inured themselves to heresy over the centuries of their lives, girding their souls in the armour of contempt. They despised me, but they didn’t fear me. That was another incarnation of their ignorance, of course. They didn’t fear me because they didn’t truly know what they were dealing with.

  They asked their questions, but I fell silent, musing on the hundreds of titles they had bestowed upon me.

  It would have been pleasant to see them, to match faces to voices. It would have been even finer to sense them, to reach for them with my secret sight. But while they are naive and ignorant, they are not foolish. They know how to keep me in captivity.

  ‘All those names,’ I said, exhaling gently.

  My inquisitors fell silent. The only sound above their quiet breathing was that of Thoth’s quill, scratching ever onwards.

  ‘The Imperium is founded upon the worship of ignorance. I offer no insult by saying it. Ignorance keeps stability, and stability keeps the Imperium alive. How placid would the untold trillions of the human herd be if they knew what lies behind the veil of reality? How docile would they be if they knew even a shadow of the truth? Ignorance is a necessary evil for the empire.’

  They did not dispute it. My hosts are far too shrewd to bother with lies.

  ‘You have lost so much lore that I can barely comprehend where your ignorance ends and your innocence begins. Again, I offer no insult. It is simply the way of things. You have given me hundreds of names, and recounted hundreds of wars. Most are mine. Many are not.

  ‘You name me the Arch-Heretic of Angelus Porphyra. Yet I have never looked upon that world, even once. You name me Zaraphiston, as if I should be awed at your insight, but Zaraphiston is not a name given at birth. It is a title later grafted over an identity. And you name me Ygethmor, yet Ygethmor is not even a name. It’s an expression in a forgotten language, from a dead world. It means “weaver” or “threader” of the warp. And I am not the only warrior to bear that title, as it happens. It seems to be a name applied, at will and on whim, to whomever the Imperium is hunting at the time. Do you begin to see what I mean?’

  ‘What language?’ one of the females asked. ‘From what world?’

  ‘The root language is Cthonic. I can speak several of its dialects. The world itself was Cthonia. I have spoken of it briefly, in retelling Falkus’s heritage.’

  ‘Even before your remembrances, we knew of Unholy Cthonia, lost these ten thousand years.’

  There was something about the way she said the world’s name. She sounded so adamant, so utterly sure she clutched the keys to the kingdom. How many sealed archives did this inquisitor have to decrypt to cut free that tiny sliver of forbidden knowledge? How desperately has the Imperium tried to purge all record of the Traitor Legions?

  And yet to mock them for their ignorance would be to misunderstand the scale of the Imperium and its ten thousand-year devotion to pretending the past never happened.

  ‘You are stalling,’ one of the males accused me. ‘Tell us how the Sons of Horus took their new title. Tell us how they became the Black Legion.’

  At first, I had no answer. I wasn’t certain the question was genuine.

  ‘I said I would tell you how the Sons of Horus died and how the Black Legion was born. I never said one became the other.’

  But he wasn’t finished. He had scripture of his own to quote.

  ‘It is written by Scryer Dianthon: “And thus, driven from Holy Terra and reigning forevermore in the underworld, the Sons of Horus, the treacherous Sixteenth, became the Black Legion.”’

  Ah. Suddenly it all made sense.

  ‘From shame and shadow recast,’ I said softly, the words for myself alone. ‘In black and gold reborn.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I told you – before the beginning, there was an end. The Sons of Horus never reigned in the Eye. Their ghosts commanded nothing but graveyards of their own warships. Their shades ruled over fallen fortresses. The Sons of Horus died ten thousand of your years ago. I know. I watched it happen. They were the Sixteenth Legion. But the Black Legion was not founded by the Emperor and never fought in his name. It bears no number. Numbers were only bestowed upon the Legions of the Great Crusade, and we, my Imperial friends, are the Legion of the Long War.’

  For five months we sailed, we prepared, and we healed.

  Each onboard dawn, I trained with Lheor in the sparring cages, axe against axe. Sometimes Ashur-Kai would watch with emotionless regard, or sometimes Lheor’s surviving brothers would watch and cheer when one of us landed a particularly elegant or vicious blow. They were indiscriminate in their praise, lauding any decent strike rather than solely encouraging their commander. I admired that.

  The pain they suffered in their skulls often manifested around them. When their cerebral implants truly bit deep, little sliver-spirits of agony would flicker into being, crawling across the World Eaters armour plating. These mindless pulses of incarnated sensation would skitter over the red ceramite like lizards, before dissolving back into the warp-charged air. Mostly, the legionaries paid these insignificant manifestations no heed at all – the appearance of minor emotion-daemons was hardly rare in the Eye – but Lheor’s lieutenant, the warrior Ugrivian, was often crawling with them. I saw him eat one of them once, the tiny snake-thing thrashing in his fist, before he bit its snapping head off and swallowed the morsel with a low chuckle.

  ‘You are aware the Neverborn offer no sustenance to us,’ I pointed out to him.

  He swallowed the rest of the squirming, white corpse. I watched it wriggling down the muscles of his neck, before it fell into his guts.

  ‘You’re good with an axe, Khayo
n. I respect that. But you’re too high and mighty to admit there’s no better way to insult an enemy than to shit him out once you’re done with him.’

  To my shame, I laughed. ‘You are vile, Ugrivian.’

  ‘Vile. Honest.’ He shrugged. ‘All the same in this Gods-damned place.’

  Ashur-Kai declined all offers to spar. I accepted them on his behalf, winning some, losing some, and always relishing the burn of honest sweat that followed. I had missed this, living alone for too long with only Rubricae for company.

  None of us spoke of Falkus’s foolish ambitions to find Abaddon and the Vengeful Spirit. None of us spoke of the Radiant Worlds.

  One morning, when Lheor and I stood exhausted after a bout that lasted four hours and ended in a furious draw, I saw Nefertari watching from the chamber doorway. She had healed away from the storm, slaking her painful thirst on the slaves I sent to her. Still, she rarely left the Aerie. On that morning she shook her head in amusement at the spar she’d just witnessed, and left us there, unchallenged.

  Sweat bathed Lheor’s scarred face. ‘Your disgusting alien was watching us.’

  ‘She was.’

  ‘I could beat her.’

  ‘No,’ I said honestly. ‘You could not.’

  Days later, during a duel where we’d both committed to using only unpowered combat blades, he tried the ancient and lauded trick of plain distraction.

  ‘I like your axe,’ he said, between the crashing blades.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your axe. I like it. I want it.’

  Basic conversation was something that had eroded from me, and I had never been particularly gifted at it to begin with. Few of the Legiones Astartes are.

  ‘Remember when I found you on Prospero?’ he chuckled. ‘Lying atop all those dead Wolves, clutching that big bastard’s axe in your hand. The Wolf champion you killed – what was his name again?’

  He disengaged as I replied, seeking to gain some breathing space in the distraction. No such luck; I followed, blade against blade.

  ‘Eyarik Born-of-Fire.’

  I knew that, for it had been inscribed upon Saern itself. The Wolf had also shouted it at me as he tried to kill me, no doubt wanting my shade to reach the afterlife knowing just who had been responsible for my demise.

  ‘They never did anything like the rest of us, did they? Even their names were insane.’

  ‘It was a soul name. They used them as–’

  ‘I couldn’t care less what excuses they gave.’ Lheor grunted as our knives locked together. We met, eye to eye, until he threw me back several metres. The duel continued.

  Ten minutes later, apropos of nothing, he said, ‘Thank you.’

  Clever, clever. I almost lowered my blade. ‘Why are you thanking me?’

  ‘For getting me off that ship.’

  ‘You are welcome. If you wish, we can conduct more formal funeral rites for your brothers lost in the battle.’

  ‘Funeral rites.’ A bronze grin split his ruined face. ‘War catches up to everyone, Khayon. There’s no sense revelling in sorrow. That’s always been the problem with you Tizcans, eh? Making sorrow into an art. The art of self-pity.’

  He didn’t let me reply. ‘And just who is Telemachon?’ he asked.

  ‘An old enemy.’

  ‘Obviously, else you’d not have had me drag his half-dead body through your magic gate.’

  ‘Please do not call it magic.’

  He grinned as we locked blades again. ‘So humour me. I never refuse having someone new to hate. Who is he?’

  ‘An enemy from Terra.’ I suspected that would be enough of an answer to set him on the right path, and I was right.

  ‘Ah,’ Lheor gave a black-hearted laugh. ‘Captain Lyral and those purple bastards of the Fifty-First Company were supposed to support you, eh? Yet they left you kicking in the wind and never fired a single bolt at the palace walls.’

  It wasn’t an uncommon tale. Hundreds of forces spread across the Nine Legions had committed to the Siege of the Emperor’s Palace, only to find the III Legion had broken ranks and abandoned the fight. While we fought and died on the walls of the war’s final fortress, the Emperor’s Children tore their way across mankind’s cradle world in the hunt for slaves, and the satisfaction of butchering the undefended population.

  I think most of us realised that day, even through the madness of the war we were fighting, just how far the III Legion had fallen. Not fallen to the Gods. No, one does not ‘fall’ into that, except in ignorance. I mean that they descended into the pursuit of their own desires above all else. To abandon all ambition in favour of slaking mortal desire. That is a real, true fall.

  ‘Did you lose many men on Terra?’ Lheor asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted. Both of us were breathing heavily. Both combat blades were blunted and nicked to near uselessness. ‘A great many.’

  ‘You and I both, sorcerer. All that planning, eh? All those war councils aboard the Vengeful Spirit. All our fathers’ best-laid plans turning to piss the moment our boots touched sacred soil. I’ve seen bigger fights since that battle, but losing hasn’t ever hurt quite as much as it did that day.’

  The pain in his voice was so real, so earnest, that I stepped back to give him pause. This deserved a more reasoned and full discussion than–

  His elbow took me in the cheek, hammering me to the deck.

  ‘Too easy,’ he said. ‘The Tizcan way – distracted by sentiment and melancholy. See what I mean about turning sorrow into an art?’

  I took his offered hand as he helped me rise.

  ‘Lesson learned.’

  We sailed first for the safety of neutral ground. For us, that meant Gallium. The Kha’Sherhan, my warband, had no home port but Gallium came close. In orbit above the mineral-rich globe with its caul of ochre cloud cover was Niobia Halo, the celestial fortress of Governess Ceraxia. We had done business together several times in the past. I served to her exacting standards, and she always paid very well.

  It took five months to reach Gallium, making good time through the aetheric tides. Eyespace is neither real nor unreal – it is an impossible amalgamation of both, forming a third element between physical laws and the stuff of imagination and nightmares. Our purgatorial domain is a place where reality itself answers the whims of mortal minds. Emotion and thought reshape the warp-touched matter. What you imagine takes form around you. What you think, happens. It takes a degree of strength to simply not destroy yourself with a wayward thought, but we adapted over time.

  For those who have never walked where gods and men meet, I will cut the description to something simpler. It is hardly uncommon for Imperial visionaries and astropaths to look too far, too deep, and suffer the consequences of staring into the abyss. They lose their minds and cry of impossible scenes that they claim are vistas within the afterlife. These twisted towers of flesh and bone rising from the skull-encrusted soil of the Eye’s hell-worlds are not architecture brought about by sweat and engineering. Slaves and mutants and daemons did not build these unimaginable constructs. The fortresses of the underworld are brought about by ambition and willpower, not rockcrete and durasteel.

  As I said: what you imagine will take shape around you.

  Gallium was one such world. The planet was one immense foundry, from pole to pole and horizon to horizon. All signs of natural weather had long since been slain from its surface. The thick, unmoving clouds were born from the million chimneys and smokestacks of heavy industry, and the unpredictable precipitation came in sudden deluges of poisonous acid rain.

  The fortress-foundries of Gallium had supplied the Tlaloc with ammunition and repair several times in the past, in return for my services at the Governess’s side. I had walked the world’s surface once, and had no desire to do so again. There is little of interest in seeing billions of false-life forms conjured from Aetheri
a at work in mines and forges. The world’s population were clockwork iron avatars without faces or features, ostensibly human in shape yet devoid of all soul and spark.

  ‘Tell me, Iskandar,’ she’d once said to me. ‘Your Rubricae... Would they work in my mines if you willed them to do so?’

  ‘They are my brothers, Governess, not slaves. Please bear that in mind when you ask me such things.’

  Niobia Halo, the orbital installation, was the focal point of activity around Gallium. True to its name, it ringed the world as a halo: a metal ring above the planet’s northern pole, vast enough to receive ten capital ships in its dockyards, and armed with enough firepower to defend against three times that number.

  We watched it growing on the occulus. Four ships were docked; another one stood at high anchor. The undocked vessel was a brute in any sense of the word – the Thane, a heavy cruiser in the void-darkened metallic hue of the Iron Warriors Legion, now with the splayed robotic hand sigil of Gallium marked more than a thousand times across its hull. It hung in space, watching over its domain in cold silence. Even from the distance of our approach vector, I could see its battlement cannons rolling to face us. A similar motion was taking place along the walls of the starport, as well. Niobia Halo knew we were here.

  ‘The docked ships?’ I called from my throne.

  It was Ashur-Kai who answered from his observation balcony above the deck. ‘The frigate without markings returns no alignment code, either. But the destroyer is the Fury of the First Legion, and the two frigates declare themselves as the Knave of Swords and the Skinner.’

  The Fury of the First Legion. Dark Angels. Rare were the nights that the First Legion’s rebel battleships sailed as part of a fleet. They were surely here alone.

  The Knave of Swords and the Skinner declared no allegiance – hardly uncommon in the Empire of the Eye – and I didn’t care enough to look too deeply into their loyalties. I doubted we would be here long enough to make any new enemies.

  Even so, I couldn’t stop a disbelieving smile. ‘That warband named their vessel the Skinner?’