The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

‘And why us?’ I asked. ‘For what purpose?’

  Abaddon nodded to Sargon once more. ‘That is what he is trying to show you.’

  We are children – with the ambitions of adults and the knowledge of enlightenment – looking across the City of Light with eyes that have seen nothing of war. The night is hot. The stars are bright. The wind, when it bothers to breathe, cools the season’s sweat on our skin.

  ‘What if they refuse us?’ the other boy asks me.

  ‘Then I will be an explorer,’ I tell him. ‘I will walk the Wild Lands and be the first to found a new city on Prospero.’

  He isn’t reassured. ‘There is only the Legion, Iskandar. To be anything else is to fail our people.’

  I summon a glass of water to my hand from across the table, spilling some on the way. Mekhari has to reach for his, leaning over the table to get it. I do not comment on it.

  I sense his jealousy but do not comment on that, either.

  We...

  ...are no longer children. We are men with guns that kick in our fists, swords that roar, and it is our duty to bring worlds to their knees.

  Our father, a creature of such power that it hurts to look upon him, strides through our ranks. He aims a sword at the stone walls of a foreign city.

  ‘Illuminate them!’

  Mekhari is next to me in the battle formation. We march together, pulling on our helms in the same moment. The Crimson King demands that this city fall by sundown. We will make it so. We...

  ...gather in a chamber the size of a coliseum, listening to Horus Lupercal detail how Terra will die. The tactical analysis is over. We are deep into the speeches, now.

  Some of the Warmaster’s supreme genius in dealing with his fellow warriors has eroded. Once he encouraged the back-and-forth flow of his warriors’ words, giving them a forum for amending battle plans and airing their perspective. Tonight, there is precious little of such even-handed interaction. Horus says much and listens too little – does he still realise we are all here for our own reasons? That this war means something different to each of us? Hatred seethes beneath his skin, and he believes we all share his grievances. He is wrong.

  Mekhari stands to my side and Ashur-Kai stands at my shoulder. Djedhor carries the company banner, holding it high among so many others.

  Horus Lupercal speaks with a god’s voice and a god’s confidence. He speaks of triumph, of hope, and eternal walls falling into dust.

  I turn to face...

  ... ‘Ahriman!’

  I have cried his name half a dozen times already. He either does not hear or refuses to listen. He raises his arms to the ghost-choked sky, crying out in exultation. Three of our inner circle have ignited in savage pillars of warpfire, unable to brace against the forces being summoned. Two have come apart, crumbling to their component particles as their mortal forms were overwhelmed by Ahriman’s careless psychic mustering. To stand with him here is like shouting into a storm.

  Names are chanted – hundreds upon hundreds of names – but even the others are breaking off the mantras and beginning to stare at one another.

  I cannot risk summoning a killing flame atop the pyramid. In this nexus of aetheric energy, it would kill us all. The power gathering around us beneath the haloed heavens starts lashing in spiteful, coruscating arcs. I have already tried shooting him, but the roaring wind steals the bolts from the air.

  His ritual, his Rubric, is failing. I have prepared for this.

  Saern cuts the air to my right, ripping a wound in the world. Mekhari is the first through, his bolter levelled at Ahriman. Djedhor follows him. Then Voros, Tochen and Riochane.

  ‘End this madness,’ Mekhari calls to our commander, shouting above the wind.

  An arc of lashing, uncontrolled etheric force whipcracks through the side of the pyramid, shaking the platform beneath our feet. One of the sorcerers still standing is struck blind. Another is hurled to his knees.

  ‘Kill him!’ I shout to my men. More arrive through the conduit with each heartbeat. ‘Kill Ahriman!’ Their bolters open up in draconic chorus. Nothing hits. Nothing strikes home.

  Ahriman screams at the sky. Mekhari is reaching for him, his gauntleted fingers scarcely a centimetre from our commander’s throat when the Rubric is unleashed. Energy spears out from Ahriman’s aura, carried by his mournful cry as – at last – he realises he has lost control.

  And then Mekhari dies. They all die.

  Every one of my warriors atop the pyramid’s apex platform, beneath the unfamiliar stars of Sortiarius’s sky, suddenly falls still. Mekhari stands silent, his reaching hand dropping on slack joints. I see him standing before me, but no longer feel him there. It is as though I am looking into a mirror and not recognising the person staring back. Something is there, but it is entirely wrong.

  My warriors crash to the ground in armoured heaps, Kheltaran head crests smashing onto the glass floor, sending cobweb cracks spreading. The light of Mekhari’s T-visor remains active, his head tilted to face me.

  I walk towards Ahriman with my axe in my hand.

  Someone, somewhere, calls...

  ... ‘Khayon.’

  There is no true shelter left in the burning city. I hide from the killers as best I can, crouching with my back to the tumbledown wall of a ravaged stellar observatory. Nearby flames lick at the heat sensors at the corner of my retinal display. The only weapon in my hands is a combat blade, used for plunging into armour joints. I lost my chainsword some time ago. My bolter remains mag-locked to my hip, ammo-starved and useless. The same visual display that tracks external temperature tells me that I have been out of ammunition for three minutes and forty seconds.

  As I catch my breath, I feel a cold sliver of unease. This makes no sense. This is Prospero, my home world, on the day it died to the fangs and claws of the Wolves. This was before Ahriman’s failed Rubric. This was before we stood in Horus’s war council. All of the other memories came in temporal procession, but this one is cast out of its alignment. I turn, and suddenly see why.

  Abaddon is with me. He stands nearby, watching with a commander’s patience. He was the one who spoke my name – the wayward warrior I met aboard the Vengeful Spirit with Telemachon and Lheor, not the soldier-prince of historical record. Patchwork armour gives off a dull gleam as it reflects the firelight. He carries no weapon, yet he does not seem unarmed. Threat flows around him in ways I cannot quite discern. He has a dangerous soul. It shows in his smile, as well as his golden eyes.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I ask him, keeping my voice down in case my words attract Wolves.

  ‘I’ve been at your side through all of this,’ he replies. ‘I witnessed your childhood with Mekhari and your years as a legionary of the Thousand Sons. You are only seeing me now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because this memory matters.’ He comes to crouch with me. I notice none of the raining dust clings to his armour as it does mine. ‘This memory defines you more than any other moment in your life, Khayon.’

  A man would not need to be a prophet to know that. Here is where my home world died. Here is where Gyre first took the form of a wolf. Here is where I took Saern from the twitching fingers of a VI Legion champion. Here is the treachery that forced the Thousand Sons to side with rebels and madmen, against ignorance and deception. Here is where I came within hours of my own death, until Lheor found me in the ashen ruins.

  To say this day defines me above any other is hardly a revelation.

  Perhaps I should be uncomfortable with Abaddon walking alongside me through my mind. The opposite is true: his presence is calming, his pale curiosity infectious.

  My tutelary is gone – dead or lost, I have no way of knowing which. We of the Thousand Sons keep these incorporeal spirit-creatures as familiars. Each one was summoned from the calmest tides of the warp and bore us no hostility, they simply drifted nearby, watching an
d silently advising. This was, of course, the age before we knew what daemons truly were.

  My tutelary called itself Gyre; it was a genderless thing of fractal patterns only visible at sunset, speaking in the sound of wind chimes when it deigned to speak at all. I had not seen it in the hours since the sky caught fire with Space Wolves drop pods.

  ‘You keep looking to the west,’ Abaddon points out. ‘The city burns no differently there than anywhere else.’

  ‘My tutelary vanished there.’

  ‘Ah, your familiar.’

  ‘No. Not here and now. Before Prospero burned we called them tutelaries. We did not know what they really were.’ I say nothing for a time, looking over my many wounds once more. ‘Why are your eyes gold?’ I ask Abaddon.

  He closes them for a moment, touching his fingertips to them. ‘I looked into the Astronomican for a long, long time, listening to its verses and choruses. The Emperor’s Light did this to me.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  His answering nod hides more than it reveals. ‘A little. No one ever said enlightenment came without cost, Khayon.’

  I look back across the burning street, where a city of scholars is dying to the axes and fire of barbarians. A cataclysm that will, in time, educate both Legions. How very apt Abaddon’s words are.

  ‘I hear Wolves,’ he says.

  I hear them, too. Boots pounding on the white avenue, shattering the marble road. I clutch my knife tighter, waiting, waiting.

  ‘How many did you kill that day?’ Abaddon asks me. Even if the Wolves cannot hear him, I say nothing. They will surely be able to hear me.

  I hear them draw close, stalking, sniffing the air. That’s when I move, rising in a snarl of armour joints and dust-shrouded ceramite. My knife takes the first Wolf under the chin, punching up through his throat and into his skull. Bless the VI Legion for going to war without wearing their helms.

  The others are already moving. Chainswords whine and bolters crunch to shoulder-guards. Barbaric threats leave the mouths of ignorant fools. Oaths of vengeance. Primal promises.

  ‘You do not understand,’ I tell them.

  They leap for me the moment I cast their brother’s body aside. That is what kills them. No longer do I seek to control the warp’s breath, shaping it into precise applications of psychic force. Now I simply let it flow through me, doing as it will. The closest packmate falls to the ground in a boneless topple, decaying inside his armour. The warp’s touch has aged him a thousand years in the span of a single heartbeat. The second ignites in topaz flame, eating his flesh to the bone without even marking his ceramite.

  The last of them is less hot-blooded. He keeps his bolter on me. I want to tell him that he is a fool, that he and his Legion are to blame for all this. I want to tell him that we are not sinners, and that the power we call upon – the powers that we are being judged and sentenced for using – are only brought forth now in the fight to survive. In razing Prospero, the Space Wolves have left us no choice but to commit the very crime they are punishing us for.

  He fires before I can speak. A kill-shot that does not kill, batted aside from my head with a flare of telekinetic instinct. It isn’t enough. He bears me down to the ground and suddenly nothing matters but the knives in our hands. Mine carves into his armpit, caught fast in servos as well as muscle meat. I am certain his has missed until I feel the pressure of a Titan’s weight on my stomach. There is no tearing pain when a blade plunges into your flesh. It is a hammer blow, no matter how well you are trained to ignore it and recover. For a moment I bare my teeth behind my faceplate, shaking the knife impaled in his arm, hoping to sever the muscles and steal his strength.

  The breath from his dirty smile fogs my eyes lenses. He leers down at me with a wolf’s stare and a man’s grin. Retinal warnings scream of the damage his knife is doing to my insides. Belly wounds are savage. Foulness and poison will leak from wounded intestines and bowels, eventually corrupting healthy flesh and blood beyond what our genhanced physiology can repair.

  ‘Traitor,’ the Wolf breathes down at me. ‘Filthy. Traitor.’

  The first mouthful of blood runs up my throat and over my lips, spilling down my cheeks to pool inside my helm. It steals any hope of reply beyond a strained gurgle.

  Abaddon still stands nearby. I sense him even if I cannot see him. For a moment of bloodstained desperation I consider demanding that he help me. The very idea of it turns my gurgling curse into a grin.

  I do not bother pulling my knife free. My hand crashes against the side of his head, not to break his skull but clawing for a fistful of his long, greasy hair. It comes free with the sound of ripping paper. Fresh spit flecks my eye lenses as he snarls, but still his weight bears down on me with crushing force. A fist to his head does nothing. And another. And another.

  On the fourth I clutch the side of his skull and plunge my thumb into his left eye. The wet crunch is the sweetest sound I have ever heard. He does not cry out or show any pain beyond the way his feral rictus turns to glass.

  His skull gives a quiet snap, then a louder crack. I am breaking his head apart in my hand, and he refuses to even acknowledge it, no different from a rabid dog with its jaws locked on prey. More blood surges up my throat and runs from my mouth as he cuts me open from groin to sternum. The pain is acid and lightning and fire, but nothing compared to the vicious, sick shame of helplessness.

  My sight is swimming now, reddened by blood. One-eyed and laughing, the Wolf keeps cutting. I keep bringing up blood into my helm. It sloshes against my face, as hot as boiling water. Tiredness covers me in a queasy blanket, and my hand falls from its grip, back to the dust.

  My knuckles clang against his fallen bolter, discarded in the ashes.

  It takes three tries before I clutch it in a sure enough grip, and with trembling fingers I force feed him the barrel of his own gun. It breaks his teeth on the way in and blows the back of his head apart on the way out.

  His weight atop me becomes a dead man’s embrace. I roll his carcass off, pull the blade from my belly, and disengage my helm to let the blood slap onto the marble avenue beneath me. Pain runs through me in time with my beating hearts.

  ‘How long did you remain on the ground?’ Abaddon asks me.

  ‘Not long.’ Already I try to move, trusting my legionary genetics to cope with the disembowelling wound. A pulse of psychic encouragement sends the process into a quickened dance, setting my flesh to scab and re-knit faster.

  ‘Didn’t you fight a Sixth Legion champion on this day?’ Abaddon asks. He follows me down the avenue, his golden eyes shining with amusement at my limp.

  I nod. ‘Eyarik Born-of-Fire. He will find me soon. Very soon.’

  ‘And how did you beat him with these wounds?’

  Distraction and pain prevent the answer. Sealing my wounds requires focus.

  I do not know how long passes before the shout comes. It chills my blood now just as it did on that distant day. No words, no threats, no promises. Just an ululating howl from the throat of a warrior who demands his foes face him.

  I turn slowly, made now of aches and wounds that will one day become scars. Before me stands an axe-bearer, a warrior of dirty nobility wreathed in a cloak of smoke-stained white fur. Fenrisian runes show gold against his war-plate’s grey.

  At his side walks a piebald wolf with its fur cast in mismatching patches of brown and grey. Pink froth coats its maw. Red juice drips from its fangs. The thing is the size of a stallion. Even from here, I catch the reek of blood on its breath. Familiar blood. The blood of my brothers and the innocent souls of Tizca.

  For no reason I can understand, I simply say ‘Be gone’. I think it is the best my weary mind can muster. The stomach wound is not the first injury I have suffered today, merely the most grievous, and I doubt there is enough blood left in my body to fill a VI Legion drinking skull.

  The Wolf Lord w
alks closer. No, he prowls, fluid and fierce like the beast at his side. The axe in his hands is a relic of true beauty. For a weary, weary moment I think there are worse deaths than one brought about by that blade.

  And then he makes the mistake that costs him his life. ‘I am Eyarik Born-of-Fire,’ he says. ‘Thirsty is my axe for the blood of traitors.’

  Crippled or not, I stand taller. The Fenrisian tongue struggles with Gothic, but adds a grim poetry to the words rather than detracting from them. I have always enjoyed their language. To hear a Fenrisian speak is to hear a saga-poet threaten to cut your throat.

  ‘I am Iskandar Khayon, born of the world you are murdering. And I am no traitor.’

  ‘Save your lies for the black spirits that heed them, sorcerer.’ He comes closer, smelling my weakness. This will be an execution, not a duel.

  Above us, the sky chokes on the blackness of the burning city. Bolters are a distant, unending staccato. Pyramids that have stood proudly for thousands of years are shattered and brought down by self-righteous barbarians. Now this warlord comes to me, spitting misguided madness at me under the guise of righteous judgement.

  ‘I. Am not. A traitor.’

  ‘Loud and long do the Allfather’s words ring. Louder and longer than the death-prayer of a traitor.’

  The beautiful axe rises. I do not summon fire from beyond the veil or beg the spirits to aid me. I look at the warrior who would be my executioner, bridge a conduit between our thoughts, and let my bitterness spill forth from my mind into his. My helpless, cornered, kicked-dog fury takes root in his heart. The warp itself floods through the bond between us, spilling through his blood and bones, breaking him down at the unseeable level of particles and atomic patterns.

  He does not just die where he stands. I unmake him, pulling him apart down to his very core. He disintegrates within his armour, flesh turning to dust so fast that his shade doesn’t even realise his body is dead. His ghost claws at me as it dissolves into the warp’s winds. My last sight of his spirit shows the incomprehension across his ethereal features. The last sound he makes is a wrenching scream as he begins to burn in the Sea of Souls.