The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Ashur-Kai’s armour joints snarled as he shrugged. ‘So it seems.’

  The Skinner. That was awful.

  We sailed closer, preserved by the promise of neutral ground, enforced as it was by the guns of the Thane and the installation itself.

  ‘Transmission from Niobia Halo,’ came the Anamnesis’s voice across the bridge speakers.

  ‘Awaken the link.’

  ‘Awakening... Awakening... Link estab–’

  ‘I am the Guardian of Gallium. State your business in this territory.’ The voice was neither deep nor guttural, as most warriors of the Legiones Astartes tended to be. It was a mechanical rasp, rendered through an implanted vocaliser. I knew it at once.

  ‘Valicar, we request permission for the Tlaloc to dock. We seek refuelling, rearmament and minor repair.’

  ‘The Governess or her attendants will hear the details of your offers of barter,’ the voice scraped. ‘Is this understood?’

  The same greeting every time. He was a man of ironclad custom.

  ‘It is understood, Valicar.’

  ‘You will abide by the laws of blade-peace and gun-silence while aboard Niobia Halo, while upon the world of Gallium, and while within the Governess’s protectorate. Any violence outside accepted battle rituals brought into my domain will be met with terminal consequence. If you swear to abide by these laws, state your agreement now.’

  ‘Have I ever disagreed?’

  ‘If you abide by these laws, state your agreement now.’

  ‘I agree, Valicar.’

  ‘Niobia Halo welcomes your return, Iskandar Khayon of the Tlaloc. Your honour guard is limited to five souls in accordance with Niobia Halo’s hostility protocols. Is this understood?’

  Lheor. Nefertari. Gyre. Mekhari. Djedhor.

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Then power down your shields and unprime your weapons. Your docking platform will be assigned at once. Do you require anything more?’

  ‘An answer to a question, if you are able to give it.’

  He hesitated at the unexpected reply. ‘Ask.’

  ‘Have you received word from the Sons of Horus warship Rise of the Three Suns?’

  The summons came from Governess Ceraxia before the Tlaloc’s guidance thrusters had the chance to grow cold. Docking arms reached from the station’s hull as crew tunnels and fuel umbilicals extended to thud against the Tlaloc’s skin. The former would keep us in place whether we were friend or foe; the latter two would remain almost empty until we negotiated for repair and refuelling.

  We walked across the primary crew tunnel, wide enough to lead a column of battle tanks with room to spare. Our boot steps rang around the windowless, dark avenue. Even Nefertari’s near-silent gait left a faint echo in the still air. Gyre alone made no sound.

  I was expecting a phalanx of Halo guards at the bulkhead leading into the station, but I wasn’t expecting Valicar to be leading them.

  He was unchanged since I had seen him last. Layered armour of oily silver covered his body, but couldn’t quite mask the grating drone of significant bionics beneath. Industrial black-and-yellow hazard striping marked his shoulder-guards, as it did his Legion’s mechanical burial mask. In his hands, he clutched a bolter made bulky by auto-loaders, a lengthy rangefinder scope and an extended barrel. Suspensor thimbles ran along both sides, the little anti-gravitic coins rendering the weapon nearly weightless. It was a bolter designed to start and finish fights with one shot, one kill.

  His backpack was similarly modified, weightier than most with dense power cables running through his shoulder-guards and feeding into magnetic grapples mounted onto his forearms. I’d never seen him use them but their function was obvious: electro-tethers, able to be fired across significant distances and functioning as grappling hooks.

  Around him in a loose array was a gathering of legionaries and Mechanicum skitarii, the Iron Warriors armed with halberds and mauls, the cyborged soldiers clad in robes of deep red and wielding weapons that defied description and name. One was plainly a laser weapon of some kind, with thick power cables feeding between a back-mounted power pack and the skitarii’s wrists, where the thrall’s hands were fused into an immense cannon with five barrels. The cannon-bearer looked at me with ten eye lenses instead of a face, and every one of them rotated as they refocused. The active whine of the thing’s laser cannon was irritatingly intense. My retinue halted before the cluster of enhanced guardians, which outnumbered us three to one.

  Valicar’s helm was a thing of grey ceramite crested by stud-horns of reddened Martian bronze. The left eye and temple was taken over by a whirring targeting monocle.

  His greeting was typically neutral. ‘The word was that you died at Drol Kheir.’

  ‘People keep telling me that. As you can see, it is nothing more than a persistent rumour.’

  ‘I’m in no humour for foolery.’ The tinny rasp of his voice was distinctly harsh. I wondered if it pained him? A moment’s brush of my senses against his revealed that, yes, it did. A constant soreness in the wet meat of his throat. ‘The Governess demands your presence at once,’ he said.

  ‘Trouble?’

  He snorted. ‘Wherever you walk, Khayon, trouble always follows. Just come with me.’

  The armed escort was Niobia Halo tradition, and objecting to it would only incite difficulties. Valicar turned and gestured to his companions, who parted to allow us passage onto the station.

  The Halo itself was nonstandard design, constructed from several Mechanicum cruisers and raw material mined from the surface of Gallium itself. To walk within its concentric hallways was to pass through a world of black iron and red metal, surrounded by the tick-tocking of clockwork machinery.

  The inhabitants’ influence over their orbital castle left it a paranoid place. Like so many things inside the Eye it reflected the whims and wills of its close-bound mortals, and Niobia Halo exuded the same aggressive, brooding neutrality professed by those who dwelled aboard. It was dark, lit dimly in the parts where it was lit at all, and beneath the sterile chemical reek that seemed to flavour the air in all of my dealings with the Mechanicum, the Halo’s halls smelt of bodies rotting out of sight, decomposing unfound.

  Here and there, Gallium’s warp-formed menial workers moved through the halls in ragged gangs, driven by the minds and electrical charge-whips of their Martian overseers.

  ‘Have you heard?’ Valicar asked as he led us. ‘Lupercalios has fallen.’

  I looked at him, at the polished metal of his unpainted ceramite armour. ‘Who told you?’

  ‘A friend of yours. He arrived three days ago.’

  My hearts gave a twin thud. Had some of the Sons of Horus made it aboard the Rise of the Three Suns? Had they managed to flee the ambush?

  ‘Falkus made it here,’ I guessed.

  What of the seer? came Ashur-Kai’s eager voice. What of Sargon?

  We shall see.

  Valicar nodded to my guess. ‘Falkus made it here. I wouldn’t sound so pleased, though, sorcerer. There’s not much left of him.’

  SECONDBORN

  ‘We found the wreckage dead in the void. My salvage gangs were already pulling the vessel apart before we found any survivors.’

  From the waist up, Governess Ceraxia was a myth coated in metal. She paced her chambers in dignified unrest, her four arms folded across her chest. Here was the Ancient Induasian goddess Kāli-kā given form, shaped from alloy-blackened bronze and iron and steel. I doubted she had taken the shape of a Goddess of Time and Destruction by intent, but the resemblance was on the haunting side of coincidence. Her face was the dark metal visage of a snarling daemoness, with slanted eyes that seemed to be smoothed obsidian ovals slotted into iron eye sockets. She spoke through clenched golden teeth, and the faint flicker light of a mouth-mounted vocaliser implant shone through the gaps in the prayer-engraved fangs. She was much
less human – and much less godly – from the waist down.

  ‘Behold our findings,’ she said.

  A full internal scan of the frigate Rise of the Three Suns showed on a broad monitor screen bound to the wall. She stared at it with unerring focus. To my dismay, it showed brutal damage far beyond what it had already sustained before and during the storm ambush.

  ‘They ran for Gallium after all,’ said Lheor. ‘How did they get here?’

  The Governess still didn’t turn from the diagram. ‘They did not quite reach Gallium itself. We brought the wreckage in from the edge of the Beryl Vicissitude.’

  She pointed to a separate hololith showing the cluster of scab-like patches of even fiercer instability in the star systems around Gallium. The Beryl Vicissitude was merely one of dozens of warp wounds pockmarking the local region. The Great Eye was forever in flux, but currents and tides whirled around eddies of deeper unrest and islands of relatively stable peace.

  Whatever had happened to the Rise of the Three Suns after it vanished in the heart of the storm, it had appeared on the cusp of a particularly violent region.

  ‘What of the survivors?’ I asked. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘They are here aboard Niobia Halo, contained within our medicae complex.’

  The word gave me pause. ‘You said “contained”. Not recovering or recuperating. Contained within your medicae complex.’

  ‘I’m very precise in my choice of words,’ she replied. ‘You know that. And I’m taking the wreckage of their vessel as payment for their restoration. If they object, I’ll have them incinerated, and their ashes flushed into the void.’

  ‘How... generous, Governess.’

  ‘It’s very generous, given the utter ruination of the frigate. Its only value now is scrap salvage. Falkus is among the survivors and I have a degree of fondness for him, but he has tested my patience with this escapade. Hauling his ship’s corpse in from the deep void took significant time and effort. Saving his life cost even more. He owes me, Khayon. He owes Gallium.’

  ‘Where is the wreckage now?’

  ‘Do I strike you as an entity with a penchant for carelessness?’ she asked, beginning to pace. ‘It is hidden.’

  And no doubt already being dismantled. Gallium’s neutrality mattered above all. Of course the city-state would hide a Legion vessel its workers had boarded, plundered and stolen – even if they claimed the legal right to steal it.

  ‘Valicar said the survivors spoke of Lupercalios. And of me.’

  Ceraxia inclined her head as though she were granting me a favour. ‘Your name has featured amidst what little sense we’ve managed to get out of them. I will have Valicar take you to them soon. First, cease questioning me. I would like answers myself, Khayon.’

  I watched her and said nothing. Gallium was one of my warband’s preferred harbours and Ceraxia was one of my most reliable allies. Her temper was not one I wished to provoke. Remaining in her good graces meant much to me.

  Ceraxia noted my caution. She couldn’t smile; the Governess wasn’t as far removed from her biological roots as many of the Mechanicum’s tech-priest elite sought to be, but her forge-wrought face removed the option of anything as basic as human expression. Her laugh, a chuckle at best, was a surprisingly smooth exhalation of breath with the flicker of her vocaliser light.

  ‘I like you, Iskandar.’

  I bowed. ‘I know, Governess.’

  ‘Tactical cowardice one moment, and moronic courage the next. It makes for a delightful contradiction.’

  She kept pacing around her seclusius chamber, which was a domed platform overlooking Niobia Halo from the southern hull section. Its scute-shielding was retracted, offering an unparalleled view of the entire orbital ring, with the stars above and the world below. The red-violet threads of Eyespace curdled the sky, though not enough to mist the view of Gallium’s distant sun – an unhealthy blue orb, wracked by solar storms.

  I turned my head to regard the two unaligned vessels, docked and locked down on the opposite side of the station to where the Tlaloc was refuelling. Neither warship bore the insignia of their warband or their Legion. Their specific allegiances were impossible to determine.

  ‘Khayon,’ said the Governess. ‘What were you doing, meeting with Falkus and Lheorvine Firefist?’

  ‘Don’t call me Firefist,’ Lheor grunted.

  The Governess turned to Lheor, click-walking closer to him. As I said, her four-armed body was ostensibly humanoid, with its skin of blackened metal reflecting the distant poisoned sunlight. The illusion of humanity ended there.

  Beneath the sculpted bare stomach and breasts, utterly ruining her statuesque presence, Governess Ceraxia was something resembling a kyntafros monster of Grekan legend, known also by the name centaur. Rather than the lower form of a horse, Ceraxia had remade her body into that of an arachnid, with the multi-segmented stalk legs of a scorpion or spider. Eight clawed and bladed mechanical legs clacked their way across the smooth deck, somehow never penetrating or denting the reinforced floor.

  A huge scorpion of dark metal, with the body of a goddess. The Martian Mechanicum would never make sense to me, but I had to admit the effect was queenly and regal in its own inhuman way. Her joints didn’t whirr or grind as our battle armour did. Ceraxia’s joints gave smooth, rolling purrs of subtle mechanical strength.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said, don’t call me Firefist.’

  ‘And why not?’

  He bared his reinforced bronze teeth up at her in an unpleasant grin. ‘Because it hurts my precious feelings.’

  She acquiesced with a mechanical chuckle and looked back down at me. ‘What was this meeting about? Why were you gathering?’

  ‘It is nothing you need concern yourself with, Governess.’

  ‘I see. I appreciate what you’re doing, Khayon. I cannot afford to play favourites or to choose sides. And what side would I even choose? The Nine Legions wage war within their own ranks as often as against each other. The city-states and territories of the Mechanicum are just as sundered by division and divergent philosophies. As for the human colonies in the Spatial Disarrangement–’

  ‘The what?’ Lheor interrupted.

  ‘She means the Great Eye,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Yes, yes, the Great Eye,’ Ceraxia cut in. ‘My point, little Tizcan, is that I admire your subtle attempt to play innocent in regard for Gallium’s neutrality. But you and I are no strangers to secret truths. Let’s not start playing coy now. What was the purpose of this gathering?’

  ‘Warbands meet all the time, Governess. Matters of alliance. Matters of conflict.’

  She sighed my name, turning fully to face me. ‘Why could you not have stayed here when I first made the offer? The Legion Wars will be the death of you, and you are so very useful. Why must you sow the seeds of discord everywhere you go? Already we are hearing word that the Third Legion wants your head for some new sin.’

  She prowled back and forth before us, eight bladed legs clicking. Despite her inhumanity she was a slender thing, more graceful than might be imagined from any monstrous envisioning. Cables hung and swayed between her arachnid limbs, giving the industrial impression of webbing.

  ‘Take me to Falkus,’ I said.

  ‘Tell me why he summoned you together. Then I will take you to him.’

  What harm was there in the truth? Would it really endanger my neutral haven? Perhaps I was being too cautious. Ceraxia and Valicar had survived conflict and intrigue many times before.

  ‘Falkus has acquired a seer of immense power. He believes the prophet can lead him to find the Vengeful Spirit. Lheor and I agreed to aid him.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  Lheor answered for me. ‘The Third Legion took the Warmaster’s corpse.’

  ‘A rumour,’ Ceraxia waved three of her hands in a dismissi
ve gesture. ‘And likely a lie.’

  ‘Falkus was there, Governess,’ I replied. ‘I trust him.’

  ‘Falkus made no mention of such an event.’

  ‘He seeks to maintain Gallium’s neutrality,’ I pointed out. ‘As do I.’

  That was flattery, of a kind. Far more likely that Falkus chose not to reveal the truth to Ceraxia, knowing she would never take a side either way.

  But she hesitated then, rather than speak immediate condemnation. Behind the lenses that served as her eyes, the possibilities began to unwind, spooling through her thoughts. She gave a surprisingly demure shudder.

  ‘A threat, if true,’ she admitted at last. ‘A significant and tasteless threat.’

  ‘Cloning.’ Lheor agreed by saying the word like a curse.

  Ceraxia stood above me again, leaning down enough that our faces almost touched. Thin-filament circuitry ran across the epidermal layer of her black metal skin, and the chemical smell of her nearness returned tenfold.

  ‘I told you to stay out of this war, Khayon.’

  ‘Yes. You did.’

  ‘I told you to let the Sons of Horus walk alone into history’s pages without interfering, for those who take their side tend to fall alongside them. I’d hoped the Legion Wars might end with the fall of Lupercalios, yet that seems a forlorn desire now.’

  I felt Lheor’s eyes drilling into the side of my skull. Gyre circled us, ignored by the Governess but watched by Valicar and his armed minions standing by the gantry stairway that led down into the station’s ring.

  ‘Well?’ Ceraxia asked, with the impatience of a tutor expecting an answer from a student.

  Her obstinacy grated on me. I doubted Sargon’s words were anything but a trap and I had no way of knowing if chasing the Vengeful Spirit was a fool’s pursuit. I was hardly blind to my own desperation in all of this.

  ‘I have to attack the Canticle City, Governess. Do I need to detail the ways in which a primarch reborn could tip the balance of the Legion Wars? When all our fathers are lost and ascended into the Great Game of the Pantheon... Ceraxia, it does not matter whether the Sons of Horus are alive or dead, or whether the Vengeful Spirit is a madman’s dream or lying in wait to be reclaimed. The Emperor’s Children cannot be allowed to win the Legion Wars.’