The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘And if you are wrong?’

  ‘Then I will kill whatever lies in ambush.’ I rested my hand on the skin-bound case of tarot cards chained to my hip. She didn’t nod, because nodding is a human gesture, but I sensed her give in.

  ‘It is a time of change,’ she said, and the words prickled my spine. She was unknowingly echoing Gyre’s warning from before.

  ‘What has changed?’

  ‘I have been watching. Watching the wolf, watching your new brothers. Watching you. Why are we really here, Khayon? Why bring us to this place on the Gravebirth’s very edge?’

  ‘I sense this is a rhetorical question.’

  She tilted her head as she met my stare. Nefertari had the most arresting black eyes. Despite their alien slant, or perhaps because of it, they forever suggested more than she let leave her lips. Ashur-Kai once told me that I was imagining mystique, purely because I couldn’t easily read the alien maiden’s mind. He was ever dubious of my bond with my bloodward.

  ‘Rhetorical,’ she said in her knife-unsheathing voice. ‘I do not know that word.’

  ‘It means to ask a question when you already have the answer, for the sake of proving a point.’

  As she paced she stroked her gauntleted fingers across the nearby wall. The clawed nail ending each finger was a thing of bioluminescent, living crimson crystal. They scraped along the metal with the sound of distant screeching.

  ‘No. The question was not rhetorical. I wish to know why we are here.’

  ‘To help Falkus.’

  ‘And why does that matter to you? Do you also seek the warship he sought? The Archtraitor’s flagship?’

  ‘It was called the Vengeful Spirit. The Tlaloc’s entire crew is a tenth of what a Gloriana battleship would require.’

  She sneered at the name. ‘And is that what lies at the bottom of this canyon?’

  ‘I do not know, Nefertari.’

  Gyre prowled closer to the eldar maiden. Nefertari ran her gloved fingers through the wolf’s fur, whispering for a moment in her serpentine tongue. They were my closest companions, yet their newfound closeness still set my teeth on edge.

  ‘You are lying to me, Iskandar,’ she said softly. ‘Not about what you know, but about why we are here and about what you want. You want that ship.’

  ‘I told you, I have no way of crewing it.’

  Her black, black eyes met mine. ‘But you do, for you have something possessed by no other warlord. You have Itzara.’

  My silence spoke for me. My heart was an open book to her, and she needed nothing more to see the truth. I stared at Nefertari. She stared back.

  ‘Gyre and I can feel the change within you,’ she said, ‘even if you can’t feel it yourself. In ignorance, my people gave birth to the Youngest Goddess, called She Who Thirsts. With her birth-cry she burned our empire. With her first breath she swallowed our souls. She craves them still, suckling upon our spirits from the shadows. So I sacrifice the souls of others to this Goddess, drinking their pain to ease my own. Their shrieks become songs. The sticky rattles of their final breaths are the lullabies that let me sleep. This is the fate of my people, who hunt me still, even in my exile. I understand what it means to be alone, Khayon, and I smell the scent in others. You are so very alone. It is killing you.’

  ‘I am not alone. I have Ashur-Kai and Lheor. I have Telemachon. I have Gyre.’

  ‘Your albino former master. A brain-damaged fool who follows you without knowing why. A degenerate enslaved to you by sorcery. And a daemon in the body of the beast that almost killed you.’

  Silence passed between us once more. ‘I have you,’ I said at last.

  That made her smile. She was centuries old by that point – older than I or any of my brothers – yet she seemed scarcely on the cusp of leaving her alien adolescence.

  ‘You have me,’ she allowed, ‘but let us not pretend that is enough. You aren’t human, no matter that you possess a human core. You are a weapon, made to be bonded with brother-weapons. That is the bond you were born to feel and you are diminished without it. That need is why you welcomed Firefist and Ugrivian into the crew. It is why you saved Falkus and his men. Your heart is poisoned and you are alone, yet you were born to exult in your brotherhood. So, finally, you fight. You feel the stirring of ambition and seek the grandest ship of all. At last you fight the solitude that has threatened you for so long. But will it be enough?’

  I was held rapt by her every word. Gyre had shared her feral perceptions of this change, but Nefertari’s lucid and patient explanation captivated me. She slipped closer in a fluid slink, opening and closing her hand, making the crystal claws click.

  ‘Will it be enough?’ she asked again. ‘You were born into brotherhood, but weapons need to be wielded, do they not? And there is no longer anyone to guide you, Khayon. No Emperor pointing from His throne and shouting for His sons to claim the stars in His name. No King One-Eye, peering into the darkest depths of the Sea of Souls and demanding you dive with him into damnation.’

  ‘I serve no one but myself.’

  ‘Such blunt, stupid pride. I speak of unity and you fear that I speak of slavery. Unity, voscartha. To be part of something bigger, beyond yourself. Without your former overlords controlling your path, you should be free.’

  ‘I am free.’

  She came closer. Too close. Had anyone else touched me as she did in that moment, I would have killed them for the discomfort. But she was mine, my Nefertari, so I allowed her the indulgence of running her gloved, clawed fingertip down my cheek.

  Do not mistake intimacy for sensuality. There was nothing of lust in that moment. Merely raw, intimate closeness.

  ‘If you were free,’ she whispered, ‘you would no longer dream of wolves.’

  My blood ran cold at those words. Without any way of reading my mind, she was still speaking my own thoughts aloud.

  ‘Do you know what you are, voscartha?’

  I confessed that I did not.

  ‘You are a warrior with no war, a student with no teacher, and a teacher with no students. You are content to exist, and existence without pleasure is no different from decay. If you remain passive, if you allow the galaxy to exert its pressure against you without ever fighting back... then you are no different from Mekhari, Djedhor and the other dead men who walk in your shadow. Worse, you will be no different from your beloved, mourned Itzara.’

  I felt my teeth clench. Both my hearts beat harder.

  ‘Just like her,’ Nefertari smiled. ‘Floating in her tank of life-giving liquid, staring out at her tomb-chamber with dead eyes that know nothing of hope. She had a reason to become the Anamnesis. Had she remained mortal, a mindless life and a young death were all that awaited her. What is your excuse for sealing yourself in such stasis?’

  I did not trust my voice, in that moment. The hesitation made her smile.

  ‘You threw off the chains that bound you. You cast aside the Emperor’s design for you, and for all your brothers. What have you gained, Khayon? What joy is there in this life? What have you done with the freedom you bought through blood and fire?’

  ‘I...’

  ‘Hush. One last matter remains.’ Her eyes locked to mine. ‘You are changing, but not all will change with you. There will come a day when you must kill Ashur-Kai. I promise you that. You begin this path together, but you will finish it without him.’

  ‘You are wrong. He is my closest brother.’

  ‘For now, he is, for now. I’ve made my promise. We’ll see how it plays out.’ Nefertari’s smile faded. She licked the taste of my sweat from her clawed fingertip. ‘Disgusting mon-keigh,’ she said softly. A last brush of eye contact was all the dismissal I had before she turned and took to the air once more.

  Once she was gone, my wolf regarded me with malignant white eyes. Did I sense another lecture in that inhuman stare? Or simply amu
sement? I moved on without a word. My wolf followed, as she always followed.

  The night I walked the surface of Aas’ciaral, with the burning rain bleaching the cobalt paint from my armour, my attention kept drifting back to Lheor and Telemachon. Things had changed. I’d noticed it on the ship many times since Lheor and his warriors had come aboard, for the laughter and the clash of chainaxes had a way of echoing through the corridors of an otherwise silent ship, but on the world’s surface we were alone. Isolation sharpened my perception of the differences between how things were, and what they had become. The changes were that much clearer.

  Come, I had sent to them both, as I led the way down the gunship’s gang-ramp. Telemachon obeyed in irritated silence, but the World Eater was less sanguine.

  ‘I told you to stop doing that,’ Lheor growled, following me onto the snow. ‘Get out of my head.’

  I hadn’t even realised I was doing it, ordering them as though they were Rubricae. Nor did they follow in funereal silence as my Rubricae would, with dull movements matching mine. Lheor walked to the left, out of step with me, his axe hanging heavy in his hand and dragging through the snow. Telemachon’s tread was lighter, more careful, hands resting on the pommels of his sheathed swords.

  Strangest of all, I could hear them both breathing over the vox.

  Lheor endured my glances for a while, then growled again. ‘Speak what’s on your mind, Khayon, or look elsewhere.’

  ‘It is nothing,’ I told him. ‘You are just... alive.’

  At first I thought he would laugh, taking my words as meaningless sentimentality. Perhaps he wouldn’t understand, or not care. Instead, Lheor looked at me for several long seconds, and then nodded. Just a nod. No more, no less. Despite everything we would go through together in the years to come, I do not believe I ever appreciated his presence by my side as much as in that moment. The power of simple brotherly understanding. I heard a wet sound from beneath Telemachon’s helm as what was left of his mouth peeled back from his teeth in a sickly grin, but his mockery was easy to ignore.

  The snow crunched beneath our boots, hissing beneath the rain’s acidic kiss, refreezing as soon as it dissolved. The world was truly trapped in time, locked in a moment years or centuries before now. Temporal distortion is hardly unknown to the Eye’s worlds, but the place still made my skin crawl. Aas’ciaral was broken unto death, yet it still lived. If time ever laid its touch upon this planet again, what would happen? Would it fly apart in a storm of asteroids, finally surrendering to cataclysm?

  I did not bother to scan the snowy landscape with a hand-held auspex. It would only read as a hundred different frozen elements, or nothing remotely recognisable, in keeping with the maddening environments of all daemon worlds in the Eye. I’d long since abandoned relying on such scans. Physics didn’t apply with any consistency here, only the whims of whatever sentience shaped the Eye’s worlds to their own desires. Aas’ciaral felt like a world uncontrolled, a sphere with its guiding mind lost.

  We couldn’t communicate with the Tlaloc. The vox was scrambled by atmospheric interference, and my bond with Ashur-Kai was equally unreliable. Not long after we landed, I felt the kind of severance that usually comes with great distance. He was no longer with me in my mind.

  We pressed on through the rain, beginning our descent into the canyon. By the time we were halfway down the ravine, our armour had been acid-washed to dull, metallic grey. Gyre walked in and out of the shadows, her black coat soaked in the stinging rain, though she was unharmed by the storm. The lightning storm flashing above the ravine cast an abundance of shade for her to melt into and rise out of elsewhere. Occasionally, she used our shadows, cast as elongated silhouettes against the iced rock.

  Below us, the ship was submerged in the ocean of grey murk that filled the canyon’s depths. Ashur-Kai’s summation had been accurate – the canyon could house a metropolis hive-city and its ten million souls. The scale of that ravine still chills my blood when I recall it, as does the sight of the drowned ship’s tallest spires along its spinal battlements thrusting defiantly above the mist.

  I knew then, before I set foot on the ship – before I even saw it fully – what I was looking at. The placing of the towers reaching up through the fog... Their positioning and distance from one another... The ship’s scale betrayed it even though we were near-blinded by the mist and several kilometres above it.

  Lheor made the same leap of logic in the very same moment. He swore in Nagrakali, calling my parentage into question.

  ‘You were right,’ he said at the end of his maternally offensive tirade. ‘That thing’s the size of...’ he trailed off. ‘Something huge.’

  Telemachon gave a soft laugh. ‘Your primarch must have been so proud to know your intellect matched his, Firefist.’

  The World Eater made no reply. I admired his restraint, though I could not help but wonder if it was purely because he lacked any cutting rejoinder.

  Lheor was above me as we descended a near-vertical patch of the canyon’s wall, punching handholds and kicking footholds in the snow-blasted rock. Loose grit clattered against my helm as Lheor kicked another foothold into the frozen stone higher up.

  ‘Imagine making a home on this hole of a world,’ he voxed. Even the short distance was generating communication crackle between us. This world was brutal on our equipment.

  I dropped the last distance down onto a sloping rock ledge, digging in with my spiked boots. Telemachon was already waiting. Lheor was still three dozen metres above.

  ‘This is taking forever,’ he added. ‘We should have used jump packs.’

  There were no jump packs on the Tlaloc. None still functioning, at least. When I told him so, it earned a fresh set of curses. These were free of any mention of my mother – a woman I scarcely remembered anyway. She had dark eyes and skin the same rich caffeine shade as myself and Itzara. Her name had been… Ejhuri. Yes.

  Ejhuri.

  She’d died on Prospero with the coming of the Wolves.

  Lheor clambered down the rest of the way and dropped to the icy ledge alongside me. The shipwreck was still several kilometres below us, shrouded in the canyon’s shadows as well as the seething mist.

  Go, I sent to Gyre. Tell me if you find anything alive.

  Master, the wolf replied, and leaped into the darkness.

  I looked skywards, where the cloud cover was a poisoned grey caul over the heavens. Spots of acidic rain flecked across my eye lenses, but couldn’t dissolve any part of my armour beyond the paint. Without a word, I started down the next slope, breaking the rock to make footholds.

  Deeper we went, into darkness. Another hour down and the rain no longer fell upon us. We were almost in the mist.

  I mused on the World Eater’s presence as we descended. It was Lheor’s way to face whatever came with an axe and a twitching grin. He seemed to consider too much planning to be no different from worrying, and to him worrying was a lack of moral strength. From what I could tell so far, he also held the arrogant belief that death was simply something that happened to other warriors.

  ‘Any word from your wolf?’ he voxed.

  ‘Nothing yet.’

  ‘You surround yourself with the strangest things,’ Lheor ventured. ‘The alien girl. The hell-wolf. That irritating albino. Now that traitor with the swords. What did you do to him, anyway?’

  I felt Telemachon’s flare of annoyance at being spoken of as though he weren’t here with us.

  Lheor continued on as if I’d answered, giving a list of the reasons I could never trust Telemachon and how I should have killed him to spare myself the trouble to come. I paid his commentary no mind.

  Gyre? I sent down towards the wreckage. Gyre?

  Nothing. Nothing at all.

  ‘Be careful,’ I said to the others. ‘I believe something is wrong.’

  That made Lheor laugh. ‘It’s tragic how that s
urprises you, sorcerer.’

  He laughed so easily. I started at the sound every time, the way a coward flinches at the sound of gunfire.

  I knew the ship’s name the moment I walked on its ruined hull. A sense, at last, of nearby consciousness gripped me. All it took to confirm this twitch of my sixth sense was to place my palm against the ship’s iron skin.

  Vengeful Spirit. The concept resonated through the hull, toneless, lifeless. The ship’s machine-spirit, whatever was left of it, breathing its identity through metal bones.

  So the ship wasn’t dead. Powered down and almost silent, but not dead. It hadn’t crashed. From our first journeys across its surface, boots clanging on the ancient metal, we saw no evidence of lethal damage. The warship stretched for several kilometres, from cold engines to ramming prow, and the cloaking mist made our judgements more like guesses, but the vessel didn’t look as though it had crashed at all. No obvious damage to the superstructure, no toppled battlement spires...

  ‘I’ve had an unwelcome thought,’ Telemachon voxed as the three of us traversed the external hull. Shadows of towers rose in the fog before us, like the promise of a city on the horizon.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘What if this ship didn’t crash? Is it even on the canyon’s bottom? What if it’s simply drifting here?’

  I had shared the same thought. The vessel was powered down. There was no way it could maintain position in an atmosphere without propulsion to counter the pull of gravity. If the ship was floating here as though in a void, that would mean it was somehow immune to the broken planet’s gravitic pull.

  But the impossibility of the idea was no reason for it not to be real. Given the random and fluctuating nature of Aas’ciaral’s dust-choked star system, I was counting on the evidence of my eyes, not the expectation of physics. The planet’s unpredictable gravity was so unshackled by natural law that we hadn’t even been able to pinpoint the planet’s location in space. This was the Empire of the Eye – it was entirely possible that here, deep in the crust of a world frozen in time at the moment of its death, gravity had been cast aside along with temporal reality.