The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Trust in the Queen of Ghosts. Hnnh. A true truth.’

  The Queen of Ghosts. The beast-mutant herds had the most entertaining beliefs. Their kind was barred from setting foot in the Core, and to them the Anamnesis was the goddess of the ship, always to be obeyed and appeased through worship. When they fought in the pits, they would sacrifice the hearts of their enemies to her. On nights given over to their tribal rituals, they sometimes sacrificed their young.

  ‘Trust her,’ I repeated.

  ‘Trust, yes, but...’

  Gyre growled at his defiance. Tzah’q bared his teeth right back at her.

  Cease that, both of you.

  Tzah’q bowed the traditional three times and turned away. Several of the other crew still cast their furtive glances towards us. I cleared my throat to catch the mutant’s attention.

  ‘Why do I sense this... unease... in your thoughts, old one?’

  Tzah’q hesitated, flinching as if struck. ‘I not know, Lord Khayon.’

  ‘Come here.’

  He walked back to me, iron-shod hooves clanking on the deck. ‘Your wish, Lord Khayon?’

  ‘Look at me, Tzah’q.’

  More heads were beginning to turn towards us now, some sibilant hunger spicing their thoughts. Curious, curious.

  Few slaves ever made direct eye contact with either Ashur-Kai or myself, and Tzah’q was no different despite his rank above the others. The mutant lifted his monstrous head, cautiously regarding me with bulbous black eyes, one of which was hidden beneath the plastek lens of a targeting monocle. His bladed horns of dirty ivory gave him enough height to stand as tall as me, had I been out of my throne.

  There. The source of his recent unrest: a wispy whiteness just beginning in the black orb of his right eye. A cataract forming.

  ‘Your vision is fading with age, Tzah’q. Is it not?’

  He bared his tombstone teeth in an instinctive growl, not at me but at the rest of the command deck. An unsubtle tide of mocking viciousness drifted from the nearest mutants. Several of them showed their teeth in amused snarls of their own.

  Attend to your duties, I sent into the mind of every living being on the bridge. The psychic compulsion overloaded the limited minds of several servitors, who either stood slackly by their consoles, or slouched and groaned wordlessly in their duty cradles, in need of a tech-adept’s ministrations. There would soon be another lecture from Ashur-Kai about my careless use of power.

  Tzah’q turned back to me, his thoughts flickering with images of bleeding fur and knives in the dark. I had shamed him with my words, giving voice to his weakness before many of the very creatures he would fight in the clan-warrior pits. Given the numbers of his kindred who had endured their overseer’s beatings over the years, many would now strike back in the aftermath of this public shaming.

  He snapped his bestial jaws in defiance, careful not to spit his anger towards me. Sortiarius bred loyal, cunning slaves.

  I ordered him to his knees. Backwards-jointed legs made the task a trial, and his old bones didn’t help. This close to him, it was much easier to see the hundreds of scars crisscrossing his fur in lines where the hair grew back a lighter shade. Wounds on forearms, biceps, chest, throat, face, hands... all on the front. Tzah’q always faced his enemies. That was a crude courage that Lheor would admire, I was sure.

  Sealing and salving wounds is no effort at all. You merely encourage the flesh to perform its natural function – scabs form, scars heal closed, and so on. But to reverse time’s erosion of flesh and blood and bone? That takes more skill in the Art than many will ever master.

  Imperial rejuvenat treatments mix chemical lore and surgical expertise, but still do not reach the Art’s heights. They only emulate its lesser effects. Physicians and haemators will engineer simple genetic deception, through cloned flesh, synthesised blood, or extracting the subject’s own blood and altering its nature through techniques of replenishment and enrichment.

  The warp alone allows the remaking of flesh itself. But you must trust it, once you breathe it into the bloodstream. Its mutagenic touch is not always as kind as one hopes. As I have said before, in the Great Eye we all wear our sins on our skin.

  My gloved fingertips brushed Tzah’q’s forehead. I had no need to touch him, but the slave caste requires certain theatrics. And as with any display of authority, the trick lies in making power seem effortless to those who serve.

  ‘Rise,’ I said a moment later, withdrawing my touch. ‘Rise and return to your duties.’

  He opened his bulbous eyes. Both black. Both clean, clear black. One goatish ear twitched. He brayed beneath his rancid breath, just like the beast that made up much of his genetic core.

  ‘Grateful, Lord Khayon.’

  ‘I know. Go.’

  He was far too useful to lose in a simple fight among his tribe. His kindred backed away from his approach or hunched over their consoles, threatened by his sudden vigour and the aura of my favour. Even his fur was darker, the frosting of white darkened back to grey. One of the taller, stronger males risked a barking bray at Tzah’q’s return, and was rewarded with a rifle butt to the cheek. He lowered his horns in submission and took his bloody face back to his duties. A challenge that would wait for another night.

  ‘Awaken the vox-link to the tertiary crew district.’

  ‘Awakening,’ said the Anamnesis over the bridge-wide speakers. At the sound of her voice, several of the beast-mutants ritually touched talismans of bone or dried skin on the cords around their furred throats.

  ‘Failing,’ she said. ‘Failing. Failing. Failed.’

  No reply from Falkus and his brethren. But of course.

  I leaned back in the throne of red iron and sculpted bone, watching the occulus reveal the endless offering of nothingness. At my feet, Gyre snarled softly, her white eyes watching as I stroked the unpowered blade of my force axe.

  What are you thinking, Gyre?

  No Neverborn has ever returned unscathed from the Radiant Worlds.

  Her words made me smile. We will sail past them, you have my word.

  Her pearly gaze drifted from the axe to the cobalt armour I wore. Your soulfire burns brighter, master. I see the axe melting in your fists, and your armour charred black.

  I ran my gloved thumb along Saern’s edge, soothed by the smooth scraping sound. At the time, I believed her words were nothing more than the inhuman vicissitudes of how she perceived the world around her. Unable to see mundane detail, forever staring at creation with a daemon’s twisted senses, seeing significance in all things, deserving or otherwise.

  She was still looking at me.

  Your soulfire will soon burn bright enough to make the Neverborn kneel.

  You sound like Tokugra.

  My wolf snapped her jaws at my teasing mockery. Laugh all you wish, master. But I see you in scorched armour, kneeling before another.

  ‘I am done with kneeling,’ I said the words aloud, feeling them slip from my lips and regretting the lapse as bestial heads turned to me from across the deck. The Emperor is dead and my father is damned. And I will never kneel again.

  So defiant. So certain. So ignorant. The pride of those who have nothing worth fighting for.

  When we emerged from the nothingness of the Avernus Breach, we sailed straight into a sky full of fire. One moment there was stillness and empty darkness, the next we were gliding through Eyespace as the void burned with golden light. Brightness scored itself across my retinas in a blur of pain. Mutants and humans alike recoiled from the sudden acidic light. We’d plunged back out of the webway into a region of the Eye scorched by the Emperor’s Astronomican.

  ‘Close the occulus!’ Ashur-Kai called down from his observation platform. The layered armour plating spiralled closed over the viewscreen before any of the crew could obey.

  ‘Occulus sealed,’ said the Anamnesis
across the bridge vox. We had several seconds of respite, before the ship lurched beneath us, brutally enough to hurl half of the strategium’s crew to the deck. Lheor crashed down the central dais’s stairs, smashing into a pack of helpless servitors and breaking the Gods alone knew how many of the slaves’ bones. Telemachon had drawn both blades, keeping his balance only by plunging them into the floor to grip and keep steady.

  The Firetide? Ashur-Kai pulsed to me as he picked himself up off the deck.

  ‘Collision,’ crackled the Anamnesis in a spurt of corrupt vox. ‘Hull temperature increasing.’

  Shields! I sent to her, to everyone on the command deck. Shields!

  ‘Void shields somnolent. Hull temperature increasing.’

  The Tlaloc gave another savage heave, throwing more of us from our feet in a tide of ceramite and flesh against the durasteel deck. Thunder echoed through the ship.

  ‘Collision,’ the Anamnesis said again, still utterly calm. ‘Hull temperature increasing.’

  The ship started to roll, sending bodies skidding along the deck as the gravitic stabilisers fought to keep up. The Tlaloc groaned in an unwelcome singsong of straining metal bones.

  The Astronomican is tearing us apart! Ashur-Kai’s sending was as desperate as I’d ever heard him.

  It cannot be. We are past the Firetide.

  I reached outside the ship, casting my senses far and wide. It hurt, for pushing my mind into the psychic fire was no different from plunging your hand into boiling water. Past the shrieking song of the Eternal Choir ringing within my skull was a feral consciousness, vast and inhuman, drowning in madness and pain and panic. It clung to the Tlaloc, holding on to us as it dissolved in the Emperor’s Light. Torment projected in a stream from a mind drowning in liquid agony.

  THE LIGHT THE FIRE THE BURNING THE FIRE THE LIGHT BLIND THE BURNING

  The ship gave another heave, sending yet more crew to the deck. Alarms howled across the bridge as hololithic damage reports streamed across my retinal display. It wasn’t just hull strain now – whole sections of the spinal battlements were being broken away. Whatever was out there, it was breaking the Tlaloc’s back.

  Something has us in its grip, I sent to the Anamnesis. Kill it.

  That’s when the thing roared. If its grip had shaken the ship, its roar sent violent shudders coursing through every iota of the Tlaloc’s bones, bursting the crew’s eardrums across the lower decks where the creature’s cry echoed loudest.

  A more familiar tremor buried itself in the shaking as the Anamnesis fired the broadsides on both sides of the hull. Entire weapon decks spat their anger into the golden void. Fresh pain flavoured the creature’s silent screams, and its draconic roar rang out again, loud enough to shatter several console monitors.

  ‘Hull temperature increasing,’ the Anamnesis said with infuriating calm.

  Kill it, Itzara!

  ‘Second cannonade already priming. Firing now.’

  The occulus resolved into an image of burning, dissolving flesh wrapping the battlements in a living shroud. Pinkish skin melting in golden fire, millions of holes opening like pits of stretching sludge as the bright fire ate it alive.

  Even through the shaking of the ship coming apart, I was getting a better sense of the creature. Something vast, some daemon-dragon or void serpent, latched on to the hull in feral madness, clinging and crushing us as it died in the Astronomican’s light. Doubtless it had been fleeing for the webway, hitting the Tlaloc just as we emerged back into Eyespace. In its death-panic, it gripped us as its salvation.

  I reached for its mind once more...

  THE LIGHT THE FIRE THE LIGHT

  ...and I pushed at its consciousness, shattering through its whirling thoughts to its broken brain. The Astronomican’s light, harmless to human flesh and cold iron, was incinerating the Neverborn. It was almost too easy to...

  THE LIGHT THE PAIN THE FIRE

  ...break its dying mind apart. No different from putting down a wounded animal. No one could have conquered the thing if it was unwounded, but savaged by the Tlaloc’s guns and melting in psychic fire... I held its mind in my hands, and even as it was already dying, I crushed.

  It burst across the Tlaloc’s shattered battlements, blasting the ship with hissing gobbets of viscera, which still dissolved in the gold-drenched void. One final shiver rocked the Tlaloc. Then all was still.

  The sudden silence was almost deafening. Slowly, the ship righted itself. The crew regained their feet in the aftermath. It took several seconds for the omnipresent thrum of the engines to filter back into my senses.

  Telemachon alone hadn’t lost his balance. He made no effort to help me rise. Instead he sheathed his swords, turning his serene gaze on the occulus. Outside in the gold-misted void, all seemed calm. We had emerged in the Radiant Worlds, past the Firetide where the Astronomican burned strongest and brightest.

  I breathed easier in the stillness. Gyre walked back to my side – she had been safely hidden in the shadows during the collisions.

  Master, she sent.

  My wolf.

  ‘Anamnesis, damage report.’

  ‘Extensive,’ the Anamnesis replied at once. ‘Processing.’ Automated ink styluses on several consoles began to scratch out the specifics of the Tlaloc’s injuries on reams of dirty parchment. The machine-spirit’s mind at work. Lheor, who was overseeing several slaves at the auspex console, began to study the printed lore. I had no doubt there was a faster-updated stream of information playing across his eye lenses at the same time, but he was a man who craved simplicity.

  Men, women and mutants shuffled back to their posts. Telemachon was looking past me, over my shoulder.

  ‘Khayon,’ he said gently, gesturing with a gauntleted hand. ‘Is that one of yours?’

  I turned to where he pointed. There, sat in placid splendour on my throne, was the ghost of a murdered god.

  The god’s face was covered by a mask of shining gold, its features wrenched into a rictus of crying torment. The expression – eyes open, mouth wide, even the parted teeth showing in detailed gold – was a man’s death-scream immortalised in holy metal. Bladed sunrays flared from the edges of the metal face, forming a crest of golden knives.

  The rest of his manifestation existed in contrast to the dark ostentation of his sacred helm. He was thin, cadaverously so, and wearing a plain toga of imperial white. His skin didn’t commit to paleness or duskiness – it seemed a caramel blend of both, perhaps born from genetics, perhaps stained by the light of a natural sun.

  I’d seen carvings of him on cave walls, scrawled by primitive men and women awaiting the coming of the Emperor. The Master of Mankind in his skeletal, ritual form as the Sun God, the Solar Priest.

  ‘Men of flesh and blood and bone, sailing where fire and madness meet.’

  When he spoke, condescension laced the words, burning beneath the gentility. Yet for all its strength, it was a hesitant voice. Here was a creature unaccustomed to speech, confused by its nuances. The spirit regarded us, and its gaze fell last of all upon me. ‘A stain lies upon your soul. A blight that feigns life as a wolf.’

  ‘She is a wolf,’ I replied. ‘And she is no blight.’

  ‘I will remove its touch if you desire.’

  Gyre bared her black teeth at the spindly revenant and snapped her jaws once. Ghost. Touch me and die.

  The thing spoke again in its unpleasantly inhuman tones. ‘A parasite clad in the flesh of the beast, suckling at the shadows of your soul. Blight. Taint. Sacrilege.’

  Gyre threw back her head and howled, issuing a challenge between the two spirits. I ran my fingers through her dark fur.

  Stay back from it.

  Yes, master.

  ‘And you, spirit, will not touch my wolf.’

  The wraithly priest extended bone-thin fingers, gesturing to the others gathering around my thron
e. ‘So be it. Why are you here, men of flesh and blood and bone?’

  ‘Because we choose to be,’ I replied.

  Behind us, Tzah’q was one of several mutants snarling and braying at the enthroned figure. A pack of them were crying out in pain as they took up defensive positions. Whatever this thing was, its presence was hurting them.

  Hold your fire, I sent to them, honestly unsure if they would obey.

  ‘Name yourself,’ said Telemachon. He hadn’t drawn his swords as he faced the thing on my throne. The question made it hesitate once more. It seemed to struggle with everything we asked, as though we spoke an unfamiliar tongue.

  ‘I am what remains of the Song of Salvation.’ The spirit was breathing, which was a rare and false gesture of life among incarnated creatures. Within each inhalation, I heard the roar of faraway fire. Every exhalation resonated with the muted sounds of distant screams.

  ‘Get off our ship,’ Lheor said, ‘whatever you are.’ His heavy bolter was back in his arming chamber, but he had his axe ready in his hands.

  The Solar Priest linked his thin fingers in his lap. ‘Once you were His will, rendered in iron and flesh, sent forth to bring the galaxy to heel. I am His will rendered in silent light, sent forth to guide a billion vessels home. I am what remains of the Emperor now that His body is dead and His mind is dying. It is a death that may take an eternity, but it will come. And then I will fall silent with His final thought.’