The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  But first we will come to Ezekyle Abaddon. My Warmaster, my brother, burdened by responsibility beyond any other warrior who has ever lived. The man who watches the galaxy burn through eyes bleached gold by the light of a false god.

  The journey to the Eleusinian Veil took almost half a Terran Standard Year in the time-lost flux of Eyespace. During that time of training and rebuilding, we settled into the dubious stability claimed by most warbands.

  Falkus and his warped brethren joined us, bringing a new horde of difficulties. Ashur-Kai and I provided them with a section of the armament district where my battle company had once trained and prepared for battle. Within days, it was a hovel of filth and flux, with the walls themselves remade by the bitter fury emanating from the Sons of Horus survivors. Some of them ruled the Neverborn within their bodies. Others were almost entirely lost to daemonic possession.

  ‘Control them,’ I warned Falkus when he brought them aboard. I did not add any warning beyond the obvious: I could unmake any of them if I chose.

  To be Secondborn is never a matter one can reduce to terms of black and white. Like everything touched by the warp, it is a continuum. Many hosts die within the first few weeks of their rebirth as their physical forms wither under the suffering inflicted upon their bodies, while others are subsumed by the daemon’s emergent consciousness. Even if the host survives the first changes, the final being cannot be predicted. A Secondborn might be the result of both consciousnesses sharing the same body at all times, or the daemon’s presence may only awaken in times of battle and high emotion.

  Falkus was one of the latter breed. His inner strength allowed for no other endgame. Not all of his warriors shared that fate, however, and even among those who did, the first few months comprised a period of severe unrest aboard the Tlaloc. The Sons of Horus hunted through the ship’s tunnels, screaming and massacring in the hunger for whatever prey had captured their metaphysical imagination that night. The eyes of a woman who had never walked on the soil of a world, the blood of a man who had killed his brother, the bones of someone who had never seen the stars... Their cravings made little sense to the uninitiated, but one cannot question the needs of daemons. They are fuelled by things of the strangest significance.

  My Rubricae guarded the ship’s most populous districts, and the Anamnesis summoned several cohorts of the Syntagma to watch over the Core. Beyond that, we trusted Falkus to work through the Time of Change without causing too much damage.

  Several of his men died during the journey. Some succumbed to the expected physical consumption. My Rubricae killed one when the warrior ran in a mindless massacre through a heavily populated region, and Nefertari killed three of the others when they made the moronic decision to consider her as prey. She brought me their tusked helms as evidence.

  ‘I can see why the Governess kept them sedated,’ Lheor remarked as we discussed it. He considered the Secondborn as a pleasant distraction, in favour of their strength and sanguine about their lack of self-control. Many of the Nine Legions considered such union to be sacred in some way, or a sign of worthiness in the eyes of the Gods. The faithless members of the Legions, of which there are many, aren’t blind to the strengths offered by daemonic communion. To survive possession is to emerge with immense strength at the end of the torturous bond.

  ‘The only difference between them and us is that their daemons are literal,’ Lheor said. ‘They don’t pine over burned home worlds or lose themselves to pain engines latching on to their brain meat.’ Here he paused, tapping his dirty, armoured fingertips on his metal teeth. ‘Falkus is still Falkus, no matter what else is in his body.’

  He’d fought with Secondborn before. If they needed time to adjust and contain the changes wracking their new forms, he wanted to allow it.

  ‘You can always replace humans,’ he added, referring to the butchered crew.

  Ashur-Kai looked upon the Secondborn as a plague. His objections weren’t founded on any delusions of Falkus’s corruption, but because the White Seer was not the kind of soul who enjoyed unreliable, unstable allies. He had always despised Lheor for the same reason.

  ‘Tokugra has spoken ill of them,’ the albino said to me during one of our rare exchanges on the subject of the Secondborn. I thought of Ashur-Kai’s raven familiar – an irritating, babbling thing that did nothing but roost in my brother’s chambers and caw meaningless rhymes.

  I did not care what Tokugra had said of Falkus. I never cared what Tokugra said about anything.

  When the Secondborn were loose and acting upon their predator instincts, they were at least predictable. Soon enough Falkus ceased responding to vox hails. When I reached for him with my senses, I met nothing but fluctuating spite and rage. Whatever internal war wracked him, it was now being fought in earnest.

  ‘Leave them alone,’ Ashur-Kai advised. ‘For now, at least.’ I heeded that advice.

  ‘Did you sense the kinship between the daemons riding inside their skins? They felt like mirrored reflections of one another.’

  Ashur-Kai confessed that he had sensed no such thing, nor did the possibility interest him as it did me. His talents in manipulating daemonkind had always been erratic at best.

  ‘I don’t see how it matters,’ he pointed out. ‘Even the possibility is hardly tantalising.’

  ‘I am a curious soul,’ I replied.

  ‘A trait our Legion used to consider a virtue. And look what happened.’ He gave a rare, thin-lipped smile, and we let the matter lie.

  During the journey, Nefertari was ever my shadow. Ashur-Kai was long used to her presence at my side, but Lheorvine and his World Eaters found her nearness discomfiting at best and grating at worst. She never missed an opportunity to bait Lheor into a spitting match of exchanged insults, who in turn never resisted the urge to answer back.

  ‘Wasn’t it our charge to cleanse the galaxy from the imperfection of alien life?’ he asked me one day on the bridge. As usual, he said such things in front of Nefertari, seeking to work away at her temper.

  ‘Our charge was also to serve the Emperor, in a reality where daemons were myths and gods were legends. Things change, Lheor. I take my allies wherever I can find them.’

  ‘What do you even need her for? Eldar are weak. There’s a reason we broke their backs in the Great Crusade, eh?’

  None of us saw her move. Even with our heightened senses, Nefertari was that fast. The whip took Lheor around the throat, coiling with a lashing crack and pulling him from his feet in a sharp jerk. One moment he stood before me. The next he was on his hands and knees before my throne.

  ‘Alien... witch...’ he breathed, struggling to rise back to his feet.

  I looked at her. ‘That was unnecessary, Nefertari.’

  She walked forwards, her sculpted armour plating not humming like Imperial power armour, but purring with the softer, exotic false-muscles of xenos technology. Her head was bare that night, showing her porcelain features lined with unhealthily stark veins, and framed by a tumble of hair the same shade as night itself. She was beautiful the way a statue can be beautiful, revolting the way all aliens are revolting.

  Her reply came in her heavily accented eldar dialect, all clipped edges and clicks of her tongue.

  ‘I do not like this one. I have watched him. I have tolerated him. And now I want to taste his pain.’

  I watched for any sign Lheor understood her language but saw no flicker of comprehension in his eyes. He was already shivering with the pain of his cerebral implants flooding adrenaline through his bloodstream. Looking into his mind was like trying to see beneath an ocean’s surface. His thoughts were shrouded by artificially heightened rage.

  ‘Hold your ground,’ I said to him.

  ‘Witch,’ he cursed her. But he obeyed. I respected him even more in that moment. To resist his killing urge showed incredible self-control. Perhaps it was nothing more than survival instinct, knowing
I could kill him before he even touched the alien, but I chose to believe otherwise.

  With a growl, Lheor pulled the coiled whip from around his throat and tossed it onto the deck.

  ‘Why do you keep that creature by your side?’

  ‘Because she is my bloodward.’ Which was true, but not the whole truth.

  ‘She is a filthy alien born of a dying breed. The daughter of a dead empire.’

  The daughter of a dead empire. That was poetic, for one of Lheor’s Legion.

  Nefertari spoke in her alien tongue once more, replying to Lheor’s words. She called him a blind fool enslaved to a hateful deity that grew fat on mindless violence inflicted by stupid, ignorant souls. She said he was the corrupt legacy of a deluded emperor’s dream to create the perfect being, only to realise the end result was a million idiot children clad in the armour of godlings. She said she saw the death of sanity in his mutilated brain, knowing that one day there would be nothing left of him beyond a drooling husk screaming in blood-soaked worship to an uncaring god. She called him the excrement that runs through the primal gutters of the Dark City, where mutants and monsters empty the sludge of their poisoned bowels.

  This went on for almost a minute. When Nefertari finally fell silent, Lheor looked back at me.

  ‘What did she just say?’

  ‘She said she was sorry for striking you.’

  Lheor looked at us both once again, confusion etched upon his features. His sudden laughter rang out across the command deck like a gunshot.

  ‘Fine, then. Let her stay. Just tell me why she’s here.’ He meant the Great Eye, not the Tlaloc. ‘She’s in more danger than any of her race, this close to the Youngest God.’

  She answered for herself. ‘I am here because this is the one place where my kindred will never follow.’

  ‘So you’re guilty of something, eh? Some heinous sin in your past?’

  ‘You will never know.’ And with those words, against all expectation, she smiled with silken, unlovely beauty.

  Strangely, the one warrior aboard that took deepest pleasure in Nefertari’s company was Ugrivian, Lheor’s sergeant. He and my bloodward duelled for hours each onboard dawn, matching chainaxe against crystal-clawed gauntlets, as well as whatever other weapons caught their eyes that particular day. I often watched them, sat on metal crates of ammunition with Gyre at my side, enjoying the viciousness of their running battles.

  Their fights were always to first blood. Nefertari held back – if she had not, then Ugrivian would never have survived the first duel – but what interested me most was that the World Eater seemed to be restraining himself, as well. He was using her not just to test his skills but to test his ability to master the cranial bite of implants forever spiking his aggression. He didn’t regard the Butcher’s Nails as a flaw to be overcome, for they flooded his bloodstream with pleasure and strength whenever he went into battle. Yet nor was he content to simply let the Nails influence his mind unchecked. Ugrivian, unlike many of his brethren, approached the implants from a more philosophical standpoint, seeking to understand the perfect point between how they altered his physiology over time, against the notion that he was effectively controlled by them. Where, he asked me, was the border between neurological enhancement and the depletion of his personality in favour of war-lust?

  I was captivated by the fact he even asked the question. Such introspection wasn’t uncommon among the warrior-scholars of the Legiones Astartes, but it rarely found root in the XII Legion.

  During Ugrivian’s duels with Nefertari, in moments of highest emotion and boiling adrenaline, the air shimmered around them with the threat of unformed spirits, weakling Neverborn feeding from their feelings without quite gaining the strength to manifest. Seeing those shades out of the corner of your eyes was merely part of life in the Eye, but Nefertari and the World Eater drew more spiritual attention than most of us.

  Such creatures avoided me. Gyre’s presence saw to that. The Neverborn sensed an apex predator in her and never manifested too near, no matter how bright my soulfire burned. The Syntagma was more than capable of purging our decks of the daemons that sought to claim the lives of my crew, and our long-roaming hunts through the Tlaloc’s bowels saw to the rest.

  In the past, Nefertari, Gyre and I had hunted with Djedhor and Mekhari. Now Lheor joined us over the course of the journey to the Eleusinian Veil. The Neverborn we encountered were endemic of life in the Eye, and always of a more powerful breed than the weaklings spawned from momentary acts of emotion. These were daemons born from the reflection of a knife that claimed a dozen lives, or the sorrow of an entire mutant bloodline devastated by disease. Wherever suffering is rife, the Neverborn will appear. No ship in the Eye, no matter how well it is run, is free of such hauntings. Most warbands encourage them. It is a fine way to make strong, Eyeborn allies, or add glorious deeds to a warband’s roll of honour.

  One of our hunts resulted in cornering a particularly rancid creature of fatty, infected flesh, attached to the walls in one of the waste-reprocessing chambers. It was glued by sweat and sticky skin to the half-melted walls, quivering in rapture as it feasted upon the pain of a nearby mutant clan ravaged by plague. The tribe’s funerary priests were dumping the bodies of their plague-slain kin into the waste grinder-filter engines, moronically spreading the disease even further through their subdistrict. After I executed the clan-lords for not incinerating their dead as tradition demanded, we moved on to face the daemon their ignorance had created.

  The shivering mass of flesh clung high upon the veined, warped wall. Its many eyes moved across its boneless body like drifting sunspots. Mouths formed from the fleshy bulk, clacking together malformed teeth in mimicry of speech. The thing was the size of a Land Raider.

  ‘Stay back from it,’ I warned the others.

  It recognised me. At least, it recognised what I was capable of, for it greeted me with a pulse of bloated, lazy fear. It was too well fed to even flee.

  Sorcerer, it sent. Its silent voice was sickly and greasy. I will serve. Yes, yes. I will serve. Do not break me, I beg. No, no. Bind me. I will serve.

  I tried to consider what this amoebic creature was capable of. What possible use could it be to me? It could alter reality like any of its kind, and perhaps better than many of them. But I could do that myself, and I held my bound Neverborn to exacting standards. I did not collect them at random like a nameless army. I preferred to pursue less common and more esoteric examples.

  I will serve, the thing insisted.

  I have yet to meet a daemon worthy of binding that actually wishes to be bound. Only the weakest of your kind give their freedom away to avoid destruction.

  But I will serve! It strained to project some vitality into its queasy voice. I will serve!

  ‘You want me to shoot it?’ asked Lheor, looking up at the thing. He was deaf to its psychic promises.

  ‘No, thank you.’ I reached out with my senses, gripping its bubbling, gelatinous edges in an invisible grip. The daemon renewed its quivering. Several orifices opened on its front, vomiting black sludge as some kind of defence mechanism. The ooze slopped onto the deck some way ahead of us. We weren’t foolish enough to stand directly beneath it.

  No! it squealed, desperately porcine. Master! I beg!

  I pulled. The thing came free with a disgusting sound of suction, leaving a bloody smear in its wake. Its entire underside was speckled with opening and closing sphincters, seeking to grip on to something, anything.

  ‘Ugly bastard,’ Lheor noted. He wasn’t wrong.

  ‘Nefertari,’ I said. ‘This one is yours.’

  She cast an amused smirk at Lheor before leaping up, taking to the air with a single beat of her wings. She’d seen the creature vomiting its poison bile and knew to be careful. I didn’t need to warn her.

  My bloodward was a black spear cast from my hand, shooting skywards with a wild cr
y. Such was her speed that all I saw of her weapons was a flash of red from the extending crystal claws.

  She leapt high and struck. It was that fast. With the sound of ripping leather, the bloated creature fell in two pieces, its final psychic shriek echoing in my mind as the bisected daemon dissolved on the deck, melting away into a puddle of diseased slime.

  Nefertari’s wings beat a breeze in the thick air as she floated there, a valakyr spirit above the battlefield. Wet foulness dripped from her crystal talons. Her mane of black hair stirred in the soft wind of her wings. She was divine in that moment, despite her alien coldness. I always loved her most when she killed for me.

  Onward, we hunted. No two daemons were ever wholly alike, nor were they uniformly malign. One took the form of a robed peddler, its skin bandaged, moving from tribe to tribe in the bowels of the ship in its quest to end the lives of the mortally wounded and terminally ill. The thing would appear in a crewman’s last moments, offering to breathe in the victim’s painful last breaths and allow the soul to pass peacefully into the warp.

  Gyre destroyed that one – it called itself the Bone Collector – after a brief battle. It died a strangling death with its throat in her jaws, and the bandages unravelled to reveal a desiccated humanoid with a mouthless face on each side of its head.

  Such was life on the Tlaloc.

  And then there was the prisoner.

  Ashur-Kai had taken several of the Emperor’s Children alive when they boarded us on the edge of the storm, and a handful were still alive – those we had not fed to Nefertari to let her feast on their torment. But only one was ‘the prisoner’.

  We kept him in isolation, bound in silver-threaded chains at his ankles and wrists, forced to kneel while leashed to the wall behind him. Four of my Rubricae stood against the opposite wall, their bolters levelled at his head. I’d left them here with orders to open fire if our captive struggled or sought to burn a way free with his acidic saliva.