The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Conjecture,’ she said with an imperious air.

  ‘Not conjecture. Possibility.’

  ‘There is more to this than idealism, Khayon. Do not play the proud hero in my presence.’

  Lheor sniggered rather like a child. I let it pass, for Ceraxia was correct. ‘I want the ship. I want the Vengeful Spirit.’

  That almost swayed her, I was sure of it. Only with reluctance did she dismiss the idea with a sigh.

  ‘Tempting. So very tempting, sorcerer. But no, I cannot take sides. I will not stop you, though nor will I aid you.’

  That was no surprise at all, and I preferred her ambivalence to her lecturing. I could not resist one last twist of the blade.

  ‘The day may come when you have to take a side, Governess.’

  ‘Do you believe so?’ asked the goddess-monstrosity. ‘For what reason would I add my forces to either side? I owe nothing to the Sons of Horus, and bear the Emperor’s Children no tormented grudge. The Empire of the Eye will still thrive even if you foolish post-humans can’t put down your bolters and cease murdering each other. Thousands of worlds exist in this realm untouched by the Nine Legions. The Great Crusade is over, Khayon. The galaxy no longer belongs to the Legiones Astartes, and the Eye never did. If only you could all learn that lesson... But, no. Instead, you fight and bleed and die and drag us all down with you. So wasteful. So very, very wasteful.’

  I kept my silence, letting her speak. Ceraxia steepled her fingers – all sixteen of them, with her four thumbs – as she spoke. ‘Gallium’s neutrality is recognised by many warbands from across the Legions. It is a sanctuary, and must remain so.’

  ‘Times change,’ said Lheor. ‘The Legion Wars–’

  ‘Hush.’ She rested her hand on Lheor’s head, as though she were a priestess anointing a worshipper. ‘Hush, Centurion Ukris. I do not possess the kind of heart or mind that will bend to any convictions you are capable of making. But you are with Falkus, whom I admire, and Khayon, whom I cherish. So I will not punish you for your lack of respectful manners.’

  ‘Hnnh,’ was the World Eater’s graceless reply. Ceraxia lifted her hand away. A wise move, for I suspected she’d been about to lose it to a blow from a chainaxe.

  Lheor was looking directly at me. ‘I’ve heard warbands speak your name in whatever passes for fear, and I’ve heard it cursed by men and daemons alike. It never occurred to me that someone would actually like you, Khayon.’

  ‘Eshaba,’ I replied in Nagrakali, the mongrel tongue of his Legion. Lheor smirked at my polite thanks, but Ceraxia reached out one of her four arms to run a black fingertip down my shoulder-guard. She traced my name written in Prosperine upon the cobalt ceramite.

  A target lock chimed on my retinal display as it framed her face. She smelt of fyceline, of gunsmoke, of dragon’s breath.

  ‘It’s the respect he shows, World Eater, and the vision he brings to his work.’ Her voice was gentler now, her focus drifting back to Lheor. ‘Khayon is an example of what the Legions could become, if they allowed themselves the luxury of evolution. I like the way he carries himself with no pretension, and respects the autonomy of the Mechanicum’s colony worlds. I like the way his name echoes across the Eye – the mage who sought to stop Ahriman’s madness. The sorcerer who stands with the alien angel. The warrior who sells his axe and sorcery to the highest bidder.’

  She looked back to me, then. ‘And they do bid high, do they not? All that heavy iron and armoured steel, forever adding to your Syntagma.’

  I thought of the priceless relic robots aboard the Tlaloc. The hundreds I’d gathered over the decades, all woven into the gestalt consciousness of the Anamnesis. Woe betide any enemy foolish enough to board my warship.

  ‘How is the Anamnesis?’ the Governess asked.

  ‘She is well.’

  ‘Good. Good.’ Ceraxia was still staring at me. I could give speeches to regiments of warriors before a battle, or order a thousand slaves to their deaths without thinking twice, yet before Ceraxia’s glare I felt suddenly self-conscious. ‘Give her my kindest regards.’

  ‘I shall, Governess.’

  ‘Valicar, take them to the survivors of the Rise of the Three Suns. And Khayon?’

  ‘Governess?’

  ‘Don’t expect too much from any of them, my sorcerer. The Justaerin are not what they once were.’

  Niobia Halo’s medicae chambers were more akin to workshops than places of healing. We walked among them, and where the slaves and thralls bowed before me and made haste to scatter before my path, they watched Nefertari with nothing short of terrified hatred. The Imperium loathes aliens with a veneer of shallow hypocrisy, as rogue traders, void explorers, and desperate generals have dealt with the galaxy’s xenos breeds on the Imperium’s frontiers since our species first left Terra. But in the Empire of the Eye, inhumans are truly loathed beyond all else. This is the domain of man and daemon, born with the death of an alien empire.

  Hundreds of figures populated the medicae chambers, as might be expected on a station the size of Niobia Halo. Machines whose function I could only guess at rattled and thrummed in sockets and cradles throughout each room, connected to life-support engines, plasma cyclers, vitae infusers and a wealth of even less obvious equipment. Half of the machinery looked alive; veins showed instead of cables in living, contoured metal. The Gods alone knew what lore the Mechanicum was putting to use here.

  Valicar led us, earning prostrations from menials and minions as we passed. We moved through the communal chambers, room after room, into the guarded vaults beyond. Runes flashed on my retinal display as the temperature dropped. Lheor and Nefertari, who were both barefaced, breathed mist into the chill air.

  The moment we entered that vault, I had to stop and clutch the iron door frame. Hunger washed over me and through me, savage enough that it made me sweat. Gyre breathed a low snarl at my side.

  I smell Secondborn.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Lheor. ‘What in the Gods’ names is wrong with you?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing.’ It took a moment to shield my mind against all intrusion, barricading myself from sensing the emotions of others. Doing so was sudden and stark, like closing one’s eyes or suddenly going deaf in a crowded room, but better that than recoil against the overwhelming sense of starvation in the chamber. Whatever was in here was dying. I was amazed it wasn’t already dead.

  Secondborn, Gyre pulsed again.

  We faced a long, high wall of upright immersion cocoons and stasis coffins. Things – humanoid but not human – thrashed in the reddened fluid of each pod. Appendages that resembled hands clawed uselessly at the reinforced, transparent ward-glass. Tortured smears of features that were once faces bubbled up through the murk, sticking to the front of the pods and staring out at us. Their jaws worked in futility, leaving scum stains on the glass where their fangs scratched and their long tongues lashed.

  Secondborn. Gyre was right. All of them were Secondborn. I felt the minds of the men they were, and the inhuman thoughts of the things wearing their bodies. A blend of mortality and the warp, no longer the former, not entirely the latter. Emotion given form in flesh.

  To be psychically gifted among a cluster of daemon-possessed souls is to hear the conflicting wants and hungers of countless conflicting essences. Yet I felt little of that here. The daemons at war within the bodies of the imprisoned warriors were so similar as to resemble each other down to their innermost cores, no different from mirror images of one another. It was as if they were all born of the same emotions, with the same lusts and cravings. That degree of symbiosis between even closely bound daemons was beyond rare. My skin crawled with the unnatural notion even as I drew closer, fascinated by the possibility.

  I moved to the first tank, staring at the writhing shape within. Something crashed against the warding glass, its mandibles straining. The bones of its face were elongated and jagg
ed, far beyond human. Whispery traces of its bestial hunger stroked at the edges of my mind, but I was well prepared to resist this time.

  It still wore its battle-damaged armour, cast in the charcoal black of the Justaerin. Vestigial wings trailed through the immersion fluid, too confined to stretch out wide. Things of dirty bone and leathery membranes, darkly majestic in their own way. They seemed to swell and grow in rhythm with the thing’s heartbeat.

  Behind me, Lheor asked, ‘How many did you pull from the Three Suns’ wreckage?’

  Valicar gestured to the tanks lining the walls, each one hooked up to chemical filters and vitae sustaining engines.

  ‘These twenty. Another few in the next two vaults.’ He was passionless as he reported. ‘The human crew was slain. Falkus said they were devoured when the warp core ignited.’

  So that was the flash of energy we’d seen in the storm’s heart. Falkus and his warriors had managed to escape to the Rise of the Three Suns, only to meet with disaster when the ship sought to flee. It was all too easy to imagine the flood of Neverborn drawn to the beacon of the warship’s detonating warp core, and the thousands of unprotected human souls aboard. Had Sargon anything to do with this? Had he tried to guide the ship here? Gallium was Falkus’s most obvious point of call in such an hour of need.

  ‘We’re keeping them numbed with alchemics,’ Valicar added. ‘Some of them are lost – others still show signs of who they were.’

  I was reluctant to ask after the Word Bearers prophet. I trusted Valicar as I trusted Ceraxia, but I was not sure I wanted either of them seeing how deep my interest really ran. And the less they knew, the less they could reveal if it was forced from them.

  We walked on. Several of the Sons of Horus had been pulled from their armour. Several had not.

  Falkus, I sent into the flesh tanks.

  Khayon?

  My brother’s voice, though only barely. Coming from a pod by the western wall. We drew nearer to him. Nefertari whispered something I didn’t hear in my distraction, and Lheor cursed in his Legion’s ugly, contrived tongue.

  When warriors of the Legiones Astartes take crippling wounds, they tend to react in two ways. The first of these is shame. Not melancholy or sorrow, but an honest and savage shame. The shame of surviving when your battle-brothers have fallen. The shame of being unable to hold the line again until your wounds are tended. It isn’t a whining sense of mawkishness but a wound to the psyche as much as the body. When you can no longer fulfil your sole purpose, the very reason you were elevated above mortal men, there will always be a sliver of shame. Doubt cuts into your core.

  The second reaction, much more visible, is rage. Sometimes this is artificial or carries a theatrical edge to quench the feelings of shame. More often it is simple anger – anger at yourself for allowing this to happen, anger at your worthless luck, anger at your foes for whatever treacherous movement slipped beneath your guard. The rage can be stained by humour, or defiance, or vows of retribution sworn to the brothers at your bedside. Inner strength will manifest any number of ways, but anger lies at the emotion’s core.

  When I reopened my senses to bond with Falkus once more, I sensed neither of the customary soldierly emotions I had been expecting. Instead I sensed the volcanic, bitter presence sharing his form, and I sensed his own weariness as a shroud around his mind.

  He was fighting for control of his own body. And he was so very, very tired.

  Khayon?

  I am here, Falkus. I approached the glass tank, looking in at the clawed creature my brother had become. I wanted him to feel my nearness, if such a thing was possible.

  Falkus was curled over, almost foetal in the bubbling suspension fluid, pinned at the heart of a web of chemical feeds and nutrition/excretion cables. Skinless muscle showed with strings of viscera still trailing away from the bare meat, muddying the surrounding liquid. Evidence of mutational lethality showed on his naked form: knives of yellowing bone pushed through joints and muscle groups in ivory spines.

  Neverborn, Khayon. Thousands of them. When we tried to run, we came under fire... The warp core... The ship was breached.

  The duality of his voice – a man’s sincerity and a daemon’s smiling whisper – added a malicious edge to his tones.

  I understand, Falkus. What of Sargon?

  Gone.

  So. Sargon had fallen. Did that change anything? Could we sail into the unknown with no guide? Would we even wish to sail there at all, heading into a trap based on a dead man’s promise?

  Yes. I wanted Horus Reborn dead, and I wanted that ship.

  Without Sargon, though...

  No, Falkus pressed. He heard my thoughts and answered them. Not dead, Khayon. Gone.

  I stared at the monster with its flesh in flux. Gone? You mean he vanished before the Neverborn attack?

  I cannot say for certain. We escaped to the Rise of the Three Suns, though it shattered our teleportation crucible. The ship ran. One moment Sargon was there, ready to guide us to safety. The warp core ignited. There was light and sound and burning metal. Then came the Neverborn.

  I said nothing, letting my suspicions form. Never in all my years – not then, and not since that night – have I met an altruistic prophet. Every seer is out to seek something for themselves, following their own agenda. I wondered just what this Word Bearer had intended, and what he had wrought with his power.

  I am getting you out of here, Falkus.

  I can still feel my fingers, the revenant told me, in a strained husk of Falkus’s natural voice. Its vicious talons scraped against the glass. I can feel every atom of my body shivering, changing.

  Beneath his words, I could feel the same thing. The daemon inside his body was flowing through his bloodstream, mutating all it touched. A slow process, but an inexorable one.

  Bide, my brother. I will get you to the Tlaloc.

  The revenant twitched in the murk once more. I hated hearing its rasping voice.

  The Vengeful Spirit, he said. Will you still help me find it?

  You are fortunate to be alive at all. This quest has already cost you a fleet, hundreds of warriors, and thousands of slaves.

  The creature crashed against the front of its tank, claws reaching for me. The slit maw gnashed as though it sought to feed on my flesh.

  I will find Abaddon I will find Abaddon I will f–

  Falkus...

  I will take the Vengeful Spirit it is the hope of my Legion I will–

  Be calm, my brother. I will aid you. Of course I will aid you. I am here, am I not?

  The revenant slowed in its thrashing. They keep us sluggish with cognition suppressors and adrenal nullifiers. Preventing escape.

  The Governess’s precautions, nothing more.

  I had dealt with Secondborn before, countless times. I would not keep them restrained. I had no need to.

  Free me, Khayon.

  True to form, even his ravaged and harrowed form exuded annoyance at his trapped fate. But free him from what? The bonds of imprisonment here, or from the daemon within? Despite my strength, there are limits to any man’s power. Driving a daemon from mortal flesh was not a matter of simple exorcism, like some priestly prayer or shamanic chanting. The reality was almost always fatal to the host.

  I will free you, my friend. Once you are aboard the Tlaloc we will consider daemonic banishment.

  The broken man convulsed in the fluid, shaking, bleeding, writhing. At first I thought his anger had broken through at last, but it was an uncontrolled spasm that bent his body in painful wrenches. Was it critical organ failure? His bio-signs had neither peaked nor plummeted, yet he continued to shudder, the fanged hole of his mouth gaping and quivering. His mutated form bled and shook and thrashed in its suspension restraints, talons opening and closing.

  And then I heard it, across the tenuous link between our minds.

 
He wasn’t dying. He was laughing.

  REBIRTH

  As I dictate these words to Thoth, I am aware of a growing unrest amongst my captors. These men and women who style themselves inquisitors would have me tell tales of the Black Legion’s victories – of the Black Crusades, the Sons of Horus reborn, the Heralds of the End Times. They crave some sliver of weakness within the words, praying that my honesty will betray a vulnerability within my Legion’s heart.

  Yet they are deceiving themselves with those beliefs and making the very same mistake that the Nine Legions made when the Black Legion first began its rise. Our truth is not locked up in simple martial might or unbreakable will. It is the same with Abaddon. The Warmaster wields a blade that rends reality apart, and bears the claw that killed two primarchs, yet even these weapons are meaningless trinkets on the path of his life. Chronicles like these require a certain context. It is important to know where legends end and history begins.

  So we will come to the arrival of Moriana, handmaiden to the Emperor and seer to the Despoiler, known across the Empire of the Eye as the Weeping Girl. We will come to the Tower of Silence and the daemon blade Drach’nyen. We will come to the Krukal’Righ, forged in the oceans of unreality and called Planet Killer by the Imperium of Man.

  The first of us – Lheor, Telemachon, Ilyas, Valicar, Falkus, Sargon, Vortigern, Ashur-Kai and myself, among so many others – have spoken of this very thing, many times. Just as the story of Abaddon is the story of the broken souls he remade as brothers, the story of the Black Legion is bound up in the tales of those exiles and outcasts he drew together over time. It is what makes us unique. It is why we conquered the Empire of the Eye, and why we will take the Throne of Terra.

  It will take many hundreds of pages to tell even a fraction of what has transpired over ten thousand of your years, and I will not brush aside the Black Legion’s prologue. This will all be told without the theatre of exaggeration or the comfort of lies.