The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘And where’s your new pet?’ Lheor scratched at his scarred face with dirty fingers, then spat a corrosive gobbet onto the deck. He did it no matter how many times I asked him to stop.

  ‘I do not know where Telemachon is. I have given him the run of the ship.’

  The World Eater gave a guttural chuckle. ‘I’m not sure history will remember that as a wise decision, Khayon. I wouldn’t trust one of the Third Legion to burn even if I set him on fire.’

  ‘I said that same sentiment to Sardar Kadalus when the Emperor’s Children ambushed us. Please do not repeat my own witticisms back at me, Lheor.’

  Lheor only grinned, showing a mouthful of reinforced bronze teeth.

  It took another stretch of days to reach the Eleusinian Veil itself. The hell in which we make our home is vast, with tides and eddies just like any ocean, including storms of impassable ferocity and islands of relative calm. Reality and unreality meet here, but never balance. The most obvious manifestation of that imbalance is that it’s almost impossible to sail a fleet in or out of the Eye’s borders and hope to maintain any cohesion. Keeping a fleet together while sailing anywhere inside the Eye was already a trial for even skilled sorcerers, Navigators, or Neverborn. But to leave the Eye – to sail from its restless, brutal borders – that took talent beyond easy reckoning. That is what made our sanctuary so perfect. We could not easily leave, but the Imperium had no hope of entering. Not that it feared us, of course. The Imperium of Man scarcely even recalled our existences at that point in time.

  Some rare, serene regions of the Eye are given over to cold, soul-aching silence. Standing at the edge of the Eleusinian Veil reminded me how an entire species died here. We spent our existences not only sailing in the echo of the Youngest God’s birth, but through the interstellar tomb of an alien empire.

  The Veil was a great red-black dust cloud choking several long-dead star systems on the edge of the Eye. Scans failed to penetrate deeply and revealed nothing worth mining. Ships that went in – few as they were over the centuries – rarely returned, and when they did they relayed nothing worth returning for. What few reports I had seen did not even mention encountering any worlds. It was possible they had been swallowed whole when the Youngest God was born.

  Our months of sailing had brought us to the Veil’s edge, and the Tlaloc drifted with its auspex scanners cast far and wide. The Anamnesis heard nothing, sensed nothing, felt nothing from within the shroud.

  ‘Take us in,’ I ordered the bridge crew.

  The Tlaloc entered the Veil, scanner-blind and shrouded in darkness. We had no destination. We had no true direction from Falkus, nor from the fragmentary descriptions given by Sargon. We simply sailed into the dust with shields raised and weapons armed.

  Nothing on the first day. The same on the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth. On the sixth day, we drifted through an asteroid field that we could scarcely see. Its size and density was a mystery to us, until Ashur-Kai and I reached forth with our senses and guided the ship as best we could in the cloying dark.

  This was once a world, he sent to me after a few hours.

  I sensed no resonance that suggested he was right. How can you be sure?

  I felt it, when one of the rocks crashed against the void shields a moment ago. I felt the echoes of life. This asteroid field was once a world.

  What killed it? What shattered it into pieces?

  We shall see, won’t we?

  ‘Gravity haul,’ called one of the servitors slaved to the helm. The pull of gravity meant a large astral body nearby. The remnants of the broken world? The largest chunk?

  My suspicions ultimately meant little. Following the gravity haul was impossible, for it dragged us this way and that, obeying no natural law, revealing no source. It was as if the planet’s remains were moving, and the asteroid field drifting with it.

  ‘Now we’re lost,’ Lheor remarked after the first week. All I could do was nod in reply.

  On the tenth day I surrendered to the need for sleep, and dreamed as I always dreamed – of wolves howling through the streets of a burning city.

  But for the first time in decades, the dream melted away from old memory into something more. I dreamed of rain. Rain that burned my skin in prickling stings. Rain falling from a dirty marble sky, down onto a frozen expanse of glassy white rock. When the rain washed over the ground, it hissed with steam as it bit into the ice. When it ran over my lips, it tasted of engine oil. When it ran into my open eyes, it ate my sight in itching bites, turning all I saw from occluded white to clearest black.

  I woke, running fingertips across my closed eyes.

  ‘Did you feel that?’ I asked aloud.

  From across the room, my wolf growled in answer.

  ‘Aas’ciaral,’ Nefertari said, giving the world its eldar name. Telemachon chuckled at that. He spoke my bloodward’s alien tongue as well as I did, though I had no wish to know how he had learned it.

  I could see why he’d laughed. ‘Heart’s Song’ was a name the planet no longer deserved. Its face was cataracted by turgid storms covering the entire world in milky clouds. Lightning wracked the occluded skies in random dances.

  It is a belief among some of my more spiritual brethren that all worlds have souls. If that is true, Aas’ciaral’s spirit was a bitter and blighted thing that welcomed no outsiders. Its most drastic wound was the source of the asteroid field, for an entire half of the planet was simply gone. Such horrendous damage to an astral body should have destroyed the world completely, yet Aas’ciaral still lived, deformed as it drifted through the vast ash cloud. A broken world unable to see its own sun.

  We stood by the command throne, watching the grey-white world on the occulus. What was left of the planet could not exist anywhere else but in the Great Eye, where the laws of reality were enslaved to the whims of mortal minds. Our naked eyes told us nothing of what lay in wait on its surface. Our scanners told us nothing. A sensor probe launched into its curdled atmosphere told us, as you might imagine, nothing.

  ‘What of other ships nearby?’ Lheor asked.

  ‘This is the Eleusinian Veil, brother. You could sail through the dust cloud for three thousand years and not see a thing until you collided with it.’

  He grunted in displeasure – a sound I was becoming used to. ‘Is there no way to read plasma traces in the atmosphere, to tell if any vessels have been in near-orbit?’

  ‘There is no way to do anything of the kind,’ said Ashur-Kai. ‘Better minds than yours have already tried.’

  I watched the asteroids, what few of them I could see, hanging in the eternal gloom. We were in orbit around a malformed world with a thousand rocky moons.

  ‘It looks like a half-eaten apple,’ said Ugrivian. When I turned to him none the wiser, he shrugged. ‘An apple is a fruit. They grew on Nuvir’s Landing.’

  ‘Why would anyone come here?’ Lheor struggled to see the worth in this retreat, because it didn’t match his needs. Thousands of worlds in the Eye were inhabited by hordes of Neverborn waging war upon each other, all part of the Great Game of the Gods. Claiming a world was often the endgame of many warbands, and what better way to spend eternity than on a planet you could reshape to your own desires?

  Aas’ciaral seemed a hollow prize, no doubt there.

  ‘It is somewhere to hide,’ I said.

  Lheor spat onto the deck, still not convinced. ‘And the signal definitely came from here?’

  ‘It was not a signal,’ Ashur-Kai corrected him.

  ‘The vision, then.’

  ‘What an amusing savage you are. A somnus-cry is a not a vision.’

  I saw Lheor’s aura flare with irritation, but he otherwise ignored the albino.

  ‘Khayon?’ he asked.

  I didn’t look at him as I replied. ‘It was a somnolent astropathic reaching.’

  ‘Well,’ he forced a
nasty smile. ‘That answers everything.’

  He wanted clarification, but like so many manifestations of the sixth sense, astropathy is almost impossible to describe to those who have never felt its touch. Even many of those in the Imperial Inquisition – who may be the only witnesses to this archive – know next to nothing of the myriad disciplines possible within the Art. Few astropaths directly serve in the Holy Ordos, and even the psychically gifted warriors and scholars among the Inquisition cannot commit to the decades required to learn how to speak as astropaths speak.

  Astropathy is a realm beyond the silent sendings of impulse and emotion that pass between many bonded psykers. When astropaths on distant worlds ‘speak’ through the warp, they do not send words, or even language. They are hopelessly unable to make any attempt at precise communication. Those trained in the Art know the pointlessness of even trying such nuanced work.

  Skilled astropaths send impressions of their own minds, projected templates of experience and triggers of memory. It might be a moment’s emotion, or hours of sensory revelation. This, consciously or unconsciously, is little different from reaching with one’s senses, though it is infinitely more exhausting. Consider the way a whisper is nothing, but a scream leaves you breathless.

  What reaches a receptive mind is never what the transmitting soul sent. If sending and receiving were all it took to form such a communion, the Imperium would be a vastly different place. Most of the skill in astropathy lies in interpreting the visions one receives, and tracing them back to the source. Entire orbital installations are given over to shackled psykers leashed onto surgical tables with pens in their trembling fists, while their mnemocrafter overseers pore over endless reams of parchment paper darkened by scrawled visions. These hubs of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica make such beautifully ripe targets for our crusading hosts. No better way to silence a system than to cut its throat before it can cry for help.

  Sending the message is the easier portion of this psychic discipline. Interpreting the dreams is significantly more difficult. When is something a gift from a distant mind, and when is it simply a natural nightmare? When is something a warning of blood to come, and when is it a message centuries late, only reaching another mind dozens of decades after its sender is long dead?

  Ashur-Kai once dreamed of a city of screaming children who vomited back foulness into the streets. Such visions are common enough among those of us living in the daemon-haunted Eye, yet he held on to it, believing it to be a message. And so it was: a vision from the sorcerers among the Chapter of the Onyx Maw, a Word Bearers warband destroyed by Lheor and the Fifteen Fangs. The albino had heard their astropathic death-cry.

  These are the realities we deal with. One learns, over time, to sense flavours and signifiers in the sendings. To feel if something is recent. To know if it’s true. Yet you can never be wholly sure.

  And if one does not learn such insight? Many do not. The Imperium has a ten thousand-year history of those who lost their minds and souls to the things waiting in the warp.

  ‘I believe it was a message,’ I said to Lheor. ‘That is the bluntest and truest explanation.’

  He grunted, which wasn’t much of a show of trust.

  ‘Allow me to rephrase,’ I amended. ‘I know it was a message. It guided us here, and though I cannot be certain of the message’s source, this is the world in the somnus-cry.’

  ‘That still tastes like “maybe”.’

  Trust me.

  He shook his head, not in disagreement but in rejection of me touching his mind. His left eye began to twitch closed, in a painful tic. How strange. A simple brush of my mind against his had stirred his cranial implants into some kind of irritation. He never liked to be touched mind to mind, but there was an amplifying factor at play, here. Was it the world beneath us?

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he said, and licked blood from his bleeding gums. The air shivered around him as pain-spirits stroked his armour in loving caresses, waiting to be born.

  ‘My apologies, brother.’ I looked back at the broken planet on the occulus screen. ‘I sense little in the way of life on the planet, though there is a shred of sentience.’

  Ashur-Kai’s silent voice was drily amused. A shred of sentience. Firefist will be entirely at home.

  My reply was just as dry. You are Prosperine dignity incarnate. Now let me focus.

  ‘A shred of sentience...?’ began Lheor.

  I looked at him. His dark, patchwork face was perfectly serious – not struggling with the concept, but needing more clarification. I heard Ashur-Kai’s laughter in my mind, but for all Lheor’s brutality, the World Eater was no fool. I’d been journeying with Ashur-Kai and Gyre for so long that it was easy to forget those with more mundane perceptions struggled to see the galaxy the same way we did. Lheor had nothing but his eyes and the ship’s scanners to rely on. Nefertari was the same, but she rarely cared enough to ask.

  ‘Whoever or whatever sent the message is a subtle creature.’

  ‘Then just say that,’ Ugrivian, standing next to Lheor, shook his head. ‘Tizcan formality grows tiresome, sorcerer.’

  ‘I shall bear that in mind.’

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ Lheor stated. I’d not expected anything else.

  ‘As am I,’ said Nefertari. My alien maiden was standing by the arm of my empty throne, running a whetstone along the edge of her flensing knife. The others shared glances at my bloodward’s declaration.

  ‘You will remain here,’ I told her. ‘There is grave atmospheric instability, and I would need to keep you shielded the entire time. This is a mission for void-suits and sealed armour.’

  She exhaled a purr that dripped with displeasure. ‘Why?’

  I thought back to the dream message, with the hissing rain that burned my skin and milked over my vision with stinging pain.

  ‘It is raining acid down there.’

  VENGEFUL SPIRIT

  I did not wish to land at random. Something had called us here and I meant to find it before making blind planetfall. Our attempts to vox through the cloud cover went unanswered, as did any psychic reaching attempted by either myself or Ashur-Kai. We spent two days and nights looking for where to land. The dream was no aid, for it never came again.

  Two days. And we were fortunate to have managed it even that quickly. Gunship sweeps and fighter reconnaissance across the planet’s continents were our only options, with the atmosphere too dense to allow for reliable scanning. At first we found nothing but low-hanging storm clouds and dead, frosted rock. The world seemed locked at a single point in time, with the clouds never moving on, and the acidic rain never dissolving the ice-rimed ground. The snow would hiss and burn away, only to freeze over again almost at once.

  We were a new element to that supernatural formula, and the rain certainly affected us. Our fighters returned after every excursion, freshly ravaged from the acid storms. Our gunships fared even worse.

  After one such run, I met Ugrivian on the deck as he clambered down the ladder from a Prosperine Sun Dagger’s cockpit. Servitors and hangar crew worked around us in a mumbling storm.

  ‘This world is a tomb, sorcerer,’ he said.

  I feared he was correct. We sought anything at all: a settlement, a city, a downed vessel, anything that could have been the source of the astropathic cry. Descending below the cloud cover made no difference to our instruments. The tormented world wreaked havoc on every auspex sweep.

  At last, we found it. One of the servitor-piloted fighters docked back aboard the Tlaloc, exloading grainy pict captures of a downed ship, half buried in the snow at the bottom of a deep ravine. From the worthless image quality, there was no way of telling what the vessel was, nor how long it had been there.

  ‘To give you an example of scale, that canyon could house a city of nine or ten million people.’ Ashur-Kai said those words as we gathered around the command deck’s central ho
lolithic table, trying to coax detail from the poor quality images.

  Telemachon had joined us, watching with disinterest. Falkus and his brethren were still silent, shut away in their sanctuary.

  ‘I’ll fly the gunship,’ Telemachon offered.

  You can’t trust him, sent Ashur-Kai.

  He is mine now. I trust him as I trust you. Let that be the end of it.

  Very well. I will remain on the bridge and be ready to open a conduit if necessary. No guarantees, however. Psychic contact will be unpredictable at best. The world is a turgid mess.

  Everyone knew what to do. I sent them to their duties, and arranged to meet Telemachon and Lheor at the gunship within the hour.

  Nefertari refused to let me leave without a final demand to join me. She intercepted me in one of the starboard mustering halls, soaring down from the high gothic ceiling of a chamber lit only by the dust-shrouded stars outside the observation windows.

  She landed with a purr of armour joints, as gracefully as a human would descend the final stair of a staircase. How she gained those wings was a tale in itself, for though she had mastered them, she had not been born with them.

  Her closeness brought the blessed silence of a mind I couldn’t easily read, and I treasured her for that. Inside her head was an aura of cold, exotic silence rather than the rolling murmurs of memory and emotion that made up the minds of living humans. Even worse was the yearning, whispering void in the souls of all my Rubricae. Nefertari’s mere presence soothed me, as it always did.

  ‘Voscartha,’ she greeted me with her kind’s word for ‘master’, though she never used it with a smile. ‘I’m coming with you.’

  ‘Not this time.’

  ‘I am your bloodward.’

  ‘There is nothing in there capable of harming me, Nefertari. My blood needs no warding.’