The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  I could feel the ache suffered by the mutants and human crew, now. The Solar Priest’s nearness made my sinuses throb. I could feel my nose beginning to bleed.

  ‘You are the Astronomican,’ I said.

  The golden mask tilted in a nod. ‘I stare into eternity and witness the dance of daemons. I sing forever into the endless night, adding my melody to the Great Game. I am Imperious, the Avatar of the Astronomican. I have come to ask you to turn back.’

  ASTRONOMICAN

  Any sailor within the void knows of the Astronomican, the so-called Ray of Hope. It is the psychic light by which millions of Navigator mutants from gene-forged bloodlines guide their vessels through the tumultuous warp. Without the Astronomican, there is no Imperium.

  Less commonly known is its source. The Imperium at large believes the beacon is born of the Emperor Himself, but He only directs the power. He does not produce it. Beneath the Imperial Palace, where a thousand souls are shackled and sacrificed every day to the grinding machinery of the Emperor’s life-engine, the Astronomican is projected through the Hell behind reality. A psychic scream echoing through the night, giving mankind a light to sail by.

  We can see that light. Those of us within the Empire of the Eye can actually see it. The Astronomican reaches even to our purgatorial exile, and to us it is no mere mystical radiance illuminating the warp. It is pain, it is fire, and it plunges entire Neverborn worlds into war.

  It would be a mistake to believe the Emperor’s power battles the Four Gods’ forces, here. It is not order against chaos, nor anything as crude as ‘good’ against ‘evil’. It is all psychic energy, crashing together in volatile torment.

  Most of the Radiant Worlds are uninhabitable, lost in the lethal crash of conflicting psychic energies. Armies of fire angels and flame-wrought projections wage war against everything in their path. We call this region the Firetide. What made the Avernus Breach so valuable was its path, not its destination. It cut through the systems forever bleached bare of life by the Firetide, and into the calmer Radiant Worlds beyond. These are the star systems bathed in psychic light without burning in it.

  Entire centuries will pass without a single vessel sailing the region, for it offers little to us beyond yet another example of soul energies manifesting in ways mortals can barely control. On more than one occasion the Mechanicum has sought to use Neverborn spirits bound within arcane flesh-machinery to record the Radiant Worlds in an ever-shifting, evolving map. Such attempts have fared as poorly as you might imagine.

  The creature calling itself Imperious was another facet of the Astronomican’s power. An unconscious surge of psychic might manifest not as light, or flame, or an avenging angel – just a holy man on a pilgrimage of his own. A ghoul risen from the Emperor’s restless dreams. I confess, its gentleness unnerved me. I had expected rage and flame, not this odd echo of humanity.

  ‘Why have you come?’ the creature asked. ‘Why sail in the winds of the Emperor’s chorus? There is nothing for you here. Your souls feed on conquest and thirst for blood. There is nothing to conquer within these tides. There is nothing that can bleed.’

  Across the strategium, the mutants and human crew were still recoiling, cowering, crying out in the wake of the avatar’s words. Tzah’q stood with a pack of several of his bridge enforcers, their antiquated lasrifles aimed at the ghost upon my throne. I saw blood running from his ears. He huffed bloody mucus onto the deck from his bestial snout, yet the rifle never lowered.

  Looking through Tzah’q’s senses revealed the source of his wounds. He saw an insubstantial aura of rippling light, the way the sun reflects from the surface of the ocean. Instead of the Solar Priest’s voice, he heard the screams of sacrificial psykers being fed to the Emperor’s soul engine.

  I will deal with this creature, I pulsed to the overseer. Hold your positions.

  ‘You are harming my crew,’ I said to the Solar Priest. ‘These mortals cannot understand your words, and your power wounds them.’

  ‘I have come as the Voice, not as the Warlord. Harm is not my intent.’

  It carried no weapons and I sensed no hatred within its mind. It felt nothing for us beyond passionless interest. We were curiosities to it, mere flickers of insubstantial life force. Its golden mask turned in a slow arc, regarding every one of us before replying.

  ‘What brings you into the Emperor’s light, here on the shores of Hell?’

  ‘A prophecy,’ said Lheor.

  ‘Loyalty,’ I corrected him.

  Imperious stroked its fingers across my throne’s armrests, watching us with a tormented metal face. The thing’s voice grew soft and reverent.

  ‘My place is to ask you to turn back, and so I ask it once more.’

  We looked at each other, we warriors from a handful of rival Legions, not understanding the spirit’s words.

  ‘Why?’ asked Telemachon. His face mask was a visage of serenity opposing the Solar Priest’s image of wracking pain. ‘What threat are we to you?’

  ‘You are no threat to me, for I am simply a bridge in the Song. You are a threat to the Singer.’

  ‘And if we don’t turn back?’ Lheor asked.

  ‘Then the Song’s next verse will be fire and fury, not wisdom and mercy. It will come – not now, not soon, but in time and in force. The Fate you seek to engineer cannot be allowed to come to pass.’

  Ashur-Kai’s interest rippled over me, feeling almost feverish in his fascination.

  It knows the future, Khayon. This creature is a vessel for true foresight. It must be bound!

  You cannot bind a shard of the Emperor’s power.

  We must try!

  Until that moment, I had never worried about my former master’s waning power. He had always hungered for every scrap of prophetic insight he could clutch to his chest, but that was the first time I began to doubt his own abilities to see through the mists of potential futures. He had failed to warn me of the ambush in the storm’s heart, but I had not paid much heed to that flaw. Prophecy is an unreliable art, and even those who claim to witness the future cannot agree on the path of events leading to it. With his sudden desperation, that failure was a sudden, sharper doubt.

  His own farseeing was growing ever more erratic and rare in recent years. Was he growing weaker as time passed in the Empire of the Eye? Could it be that he sought a crutch to bolster his own fading powers?

  We drew closer, hands finding holstered weapons in the chill of the Solar Priest’s claims. Telemachon stood at my left shoulder, Lheor at my right, while Gyre prowled low to the deck, her ears flattened to her canine skull. The enthroned spectre was distracted, enraptured by something none of us could see or hear.

  ‘Each of you has a verse and a chorus in the Song, sung from the throats of the Emperor’s Choir. Warnings of rising, of awakening, of murder and fire among the stars. Is this who you would be? These instruments of destruction? The Damnation of Mankind?’

  ‘Mankind has already forgotten who we are,’ said Telemachon. ‘We’re exiles. Just tales to frighten children into behaving.’

  ‘I ask you to turn back,’ the Solar Priest repeated. Its golden face was smeared with reflected light from the bridge’s red illume-globes.

  ‘That will not be happening,’ I replied. Weapons, my brothers.

  Telemachon hefted his bolter rather than drawing his swords, It crunched to his shoulder-guard as he took aim. Lheor’s chainaxe gave a quick whine. Saern’s familiar weight was in my hand.

  Stop this aggression! Ashur-Kai pulsed. This is a creature of prophecy. We must bind it. We must learn from it.

  Irritation flooded me with the weight of yet another demand that I heed an unwritten future instead of claiming the freedom to make my own choices. Ashur-Kai. Sargon. Now this revenant.

  This is my ship, Ashur-Kai. I do not heed the whims of ghosts.

  No? His bitterness was almost
a plea. Just the whims of daemons and aliens.

  I remember the Solar Priest’s eyes, above all else. A stare that should have been lifelessly metallic conveyed a wealth of emotion in cold gold. It was scared. Scared of us. Truly, it had come in a harmless guise only to be met with murder. This was no incarnation of the Emperor’s might. It was nothing more than the desperate last gasp of a dying man. The psychic soup had formed a cruel, cowardly minister to speak on the Emperor’s behalf.

  ‘You would destroy us if you could,’ I challenged it, ‘but we are past the Firetide. All you can do is hurl burning Neverborn against the hull, resorting to begging when that fails. Now you appeal to our morality? You are preaching temperance to the wrong audience, shade. Why should we turn back? What awaits us here? What is it you seek to stop us doing?’

  In a slow ripple of robes, the spirit rose from my command seat. Telemachon and I held our weapons tighter in readiness. Lheor’s pistol kicked with a resounding boom, barely a half-metre from my right ear. The bolt took the revenant in the chest, blasting stained cloth and viscera against my throne.

  No! came Ashur-Kai’s silent voice from his observation balcony above us. You bloodthirsty wretch!

  ‘Sit back down,’ Lheor snarled at the spectre. The Solar Priest didn’t fall despite the hole bust open in its chest. A tremor showed in its thin fingers. Veins grew dark beneath the skin of its arms. The metal of its face began to tarnish and corrode, ageing before our eyes.

  ‘You are the death of empires,’ the spirit told us as it rotted on its feet. ‘You will be the end of the Imperium. Is this what you wanted for yourselves when you first looked up to the night sky as children on your home worlds?’

  It pointed with a hand that dripped rank fluid from beneath blackening fingernails. The pristine white robes were soiled by blood and excrement, the stains appearing in slow spreads. Cracks cobwebbed across the gold face.

  ‘The end of the Imperium,’ said Telemachon, musing.

  Lheor snorted. ‘A little theatrical for my tastes, but it has a pleasant ring.’

  The Solar Priest was down on his hands and knees, given over to the rot that ravaged it. A bone snapped in his thin forearm with sharp, dry splintering, casting him to the deck in a ragged heap. The reek of decay curled around us. Telemachon walked to the dying figure, resting a boot on its back.

  ‘My fate is my own, little ghost, and I have no love of prophecy.’ That may have been the first thing he and I ever agreed on. He kicked the decaying priest in the side, forcing the apparition to roll onto its back. I could feel the thinness of his anger – the emotion was present, but starved of passion. Once he would have enjoyed this abuse, feeling the rush of dominating another being, but that pleasure was just one of many that I had stolen from him. He could feel little now, unless I allowed it. No finer way to collar him than to control the sensations he lived for.

  Ashur-Kai reached us at last, falling to his knees before the diminishing ghost. His red eyes were still watering from the Astronomican’s light, before we sealed the occulus.

  ‘Are you crying, albino?’ Lheor laughed.

  ‘Fools,’ the White Seer whispered. ‘To destroy a thing of such import... A manifestation of the Emperor Himself... Fools, all of you.’

  The Solar Priest couldn’t speak. White mist wisped from his open metal mouth. One of the cracks across his cheek split open, shedding half of the mask’s faceplate and revealing a skinless face beneath. The thing sought to stand again on shaking, stick-thin legs. Telemachon’s boot drove it back down to the deck.

  Ashur-Kai looked ravaged. The look he gave Lheor was harrowed enough that I thought he would drag the World Eater’s soul from his body right there.

  ‘Fools,’ he said again, softer yet fiercer.

  The Solar Priest collapsed, coming apart the way sand falls through loose fingers. Where it had stood lay a fluid-soaked robe and a spread of ash across the deck. Nearby mutants coughed on the dead ghost’s dust.

  None of us said anything. Had it been a weakling’s warning? A spirit’s prophecy? Or just another figure of incarnated madness among the Eye’s tides?

  It was Gyre that answered my unspoken thoughts. She padded closer to me as we stared at the spirit’s remains.

  Your soulfire burns brighter day by day, master. The Neverborn know your name, and more learn it each time you draw breath. Something is happening. A change comes. This... priest... retreated from us but It will come again. I know this. I promise it.

  I believe you, Gyre. I looked to Ashur-Kai. ‘Brother?’

  He was crouched, brushing his hand through the ashes by our boots. ‘The Astronomican is weak here, Khayon. Even projecting its image must have required immense force. And out of spite, you silenced it with a single shot fired in ignorance.’

  ‘It had delivered its warning,’ I replied. Taking either side felt petty. I had not ordered Lheor to fire, yet nor did I hold the dead creature in the same reverence as the White Prophet. Both of my brothers were trying my patience – Lheor with his unreliable aggression, Ashur-Kai with his stubborn martyrdom.

  The fight went out of him as he sifted through the ashes. ‘This dust will be an invaluable reagent in my ritual work. I will harvest it, with your permission.’

  I looked at my former mentor, kneeling in the priceless dust of a dead avatar. I could sense his fury at me, that I’d been party to the destruction of a spirit potentially gifted with prophecy. Worse, I could sense his sorrow.

  ‘Its remains are yours,’ I told him. ‘Use them well.’

  He did not answer.

  ‘And if you can find out why it came before us...’

  Ashur-Kai sighed. ‘If you hadn’t killed it, perhaps we would already know the answer.’

  ‘I did not kill it, Ashur-Kai.’

  ‘You were a captain once, Sekhandur. You know the first law of leadership. If you take the credit when things go right, be prepared to take the blame when they go wrong.’

  I thought something in my expression or my aura must have discomfited him, for upon delivering that lecture, his white features froze in a stare. Only when I looked behind me did I realise what had made him uneasy. Telemachon and Lheor had remained nearby, their weapons still drawn, looking down with me at the White Seer.

  How different the ship had become in such a short time. It was no longer Ashur-Kai and myself overseeing the duties of slaves, thralls, weapon-priests and mindless Rubricae. Others stood with us – others with their own hearts, thoughts and visions. Their own agendas, creating conflicts. Balance was already strained, for we were all leaders of men. Ashur-Kai looked up at us, warriors and commanders from three Legions, and nodded at some unspoken decision.

  So be it, he said in silence.

  Our eyes met in that moment, my former master’s and mine, and he did something he had never done before. Without another word, he gently severed the bond between us, refusing the touch of minds.

  We passed worlds burned clean of life even down to the molecular level, annihilated when the Eye of Terror first opened. We passed worlds with oceans of boiling liquid gold or clouds of impossible fire-vapour. We passed worlds where civilisations of blind things sensed our passing and shrieked at the ship with ten million weakly psychic voices. We passed worlds where the ghosts of dead eldar waged eternal war against what few daemons manifested in the Radiant Worlds, as well as against spirits that resembled men, women and Space Marines twisted almost beyond recognition. Every planet was bleached in the manifest light of the Astronomican as well as suffering the oppressive touch of the Great Eye.

  The Solar Priest’s memory haunted me. In my idle hours, I would find myself dwelling on the spectre’s words and musing on its intentions. Even here at the border of the Radiant Worlds, past the curling reaches of the Firetide, the Astronomican’s light was far from weak. Had it been a truly prophetic vision? Was it an apparition that spoke for
the Emperor and the Astronomican itself, or was it simply another ghost-flicker of psychic whim, forming and disintegrating from the Eye’s turmoil with no bearing on any greater destiny?

  Few of the others shared my concerns.

  ‘Shut up,’ Lheor said to me on the bridge when I asked him. ‘What’s wrong with you? Worrying about a thousand matters over which you have no control. Who cares what it was? It’s dead now.’

  This was on the third day after our emergence from the webway. We were looking through the occulus, at the gold-misted void ahead.

  ‘Life is so simple for you. What you can kill, you kill. Any threats that you cannot overcome, you simply ignore or run from.’

  ‘We call that “survival” in my Legion.’

  ‘But the Solar Priest–’

  He threw up his hands. Weary resignation showed across his brutal, ruined features. ‘Tell me why you care.’

  ‘Because it feels to me that the confrontation was a test. A test we failed.’

  ‘Who is there to test us, out here? What was it you said to Falkus back aboard the Chosen? We live in the underworld. Ghosts and visions outnumber us by a hundred to one.’

  I hadn’t said those exact words but the sentiment was true. He was right, just as I had been right when I’d expressed similar sentiments before.

  ‘If it comes back to trouble us,’ Lheor finished, ‘then we’ll kill it again. How many daemons and spirits have our warbands dealt with over the years? You’re sweating blood over a meaningless spurt of psychic energy. You should be more concerned with the fact we’re lost.’

  ‘We are not lost,’ I replied. ‘We will be through the Radiant Worlds in a few more days, and on the edge of the Eleusinian Veil.’

  ‘Whatever you say, sorcerer. Any word from Falkus?’

  ‘He is still unresponsive over the vox.’ I was still not truly worried. The Change from mortal to Secondborn could take days, weeks, months... As long as Falkus’s warriors kept their predations limited to worthless members of the crew’s slave caste, they were free to do as they wished while in the throes of possession. On the occasions I had reached out to brush against Falkus’s senses, I met a seething wall of poisoned memory that had no place in a human mind. Even with his will of iron, the battle in his body was not yet over.