A crack of thunder split the sky as the falling spear broke the sound barrier. It was no longer falling straight – it rolled as it plummeted, its hull streaming black smoke and its spinal battlements screaming with fire.
Less than a minute passed from the moment it entered Harmony’s atmosphere to the second it struck the ground. Long enough to let the population see death falling towards them. Not long enough to do anything about it.
It smashed into the earth with the force of the War God’s axe. Every eye I had been looking through suddenly went blind. Every sense I had been sharing went dark and cold. From orbit, all we could see was the spreading blackness of choking smoke blooming over the city. Our sensors recorded tectonic unrest grave enough to send tremors rippling across the other side of the world. Harmony itself was heaving with torment.
When I think of that night now, I still feel the sense of loss that followed the spear’s fall. The Tlaloc was almost two kilometres and eight megatonnes of ancient, ironclad anger. Once it had sailed the stars in the name of the XV Legion, crewed by twenty-five thousand loyal souls. I had dragged its empty corpse across the Eye of Terror, just as Abaddon had asked of me. And then I had hurled it right into the heart of the III Legion’s fortress.
On the Vengeful Spirit’s bridge, a cheer rose from a thousand throats, almost deafening to my recovering senses. I had risked my sister and sacrificed my ship. Now they were all cheering. I thought for a moment that I had gone mad.
‘That’s for Lupercalios!’ Falkus crashed both of his thunder hammers together in triumph. ‘May you all choke on the ashes.’
Abaddon turned from the smoky devastation clouding across the occulus. His quiet words carried in the wake of the cheering, becoming a breath of calm after the hurricane of sound.
‘Ultio, take us back up into high orbit.’
‘I comply.’
‘The rats are about to flee the sinking ship. Let’s break their backs as they run.’
The ship shook as its engines roared louder, hotter. The Anamnesis moved in mimicry, drifting higher in her tank with her teeth clenched tight, willing the ship to rise with her. I could still barely believe what I was seeing. Her presence here, before so many souls. Her vitality in form and speech.
‘Khayon, Telemachon, get to the boarding pods.’
I heard Abaddon’s words but made no move to obey him. There was too much to take in aboard the bridge. Mounted high above the tiered deck, the occulus showed thirty external views of the Vengeful Spirit’s hull, each from a unique angle. Our void shields were flaring in kaleidoscopic ripples under the ineffective fire of the enemy fleet.
‘They’re beginning to annoy me, Ultio,’ Abaddon observed with a distracted air. ‘Start killing them.’
‘I comply.’
Standing aboard a Gloriana-class battleship when it opens fire is an experience like no other. Mankind’s entire sphere of interstellar ingenuity is manifest in the brutal hammering to your hearing and your balance. No dampeners can mask the unbelievable cannonade of a city’s worth of guns bellowing their payloads into the black. No gravitic stabilisers can wholly hide the thunder that shakes through the vessel’s metal bones.
Runes began to flash out of existence on the flickering tactical hololith projected in the air above the menial crew stations. Sweeping views on the occulus showed frigates and destroyers reduced to burning hulks, tumbling into Harmony’s atmosphere.
The Anamnesis screamed with every barrage. Each volley from her guns earned another cry across the bridge vox; I could not tell which was coming first, her cries or the cannon fire. The two were indivisible. Her hands were curled into talons as she stared out from her tank. I doubted she was seeing any of us now. Her vision was bound into the ship’s scanning systems. She was seeing the void, and the vessels she slaughtered with every twitch of her fingers.
But we were not invulnerable. Pockmarks cratered across the void shields, which became tears, and in turn became gaping wounds. Enemy cruisers circled us, running abeam and risking a volley from our broadsides for long enough to let fly with their own. More prudent – or perhaps more cowardly – warships hung back and cut us from a distance with their long-range lances. I sensed the Anamnesis’s frustration, evident in a pressing tide from her changed aura. She wanted to come about and pursue the vermin that scratched at her, burning her iron skin from afar.
‘Keep the prow towards the wreckage of the city,’ Abaddon ordered. He was speaking to the Anamnesis more than the packs of mutants serving as helm crew. There seemed to be less symbiosis in her bond with the new ship’s crew. The Anamnesis seemed to rely much less on their clawed hands by the helm’s controls.
‘I comply,’ her voice was stern over the speakers. Irritated from a pleasure denied.
I could not resist reaching out with my senses again, seeking to ride the minds of anything still conscious on the surface. The scene I found was revelatory. The heart of the vastness that had been the Canticle City simply did not exist any more. A screaming maelstrom of liquid fire and violence had torn out in all directions from the Tlaloc’s impact site. Everything, everywhere was dust, ashes and flame.
The fall of a single rockcrete skyscraper can choke a moderately sized city with its dust cloud. Try to imagine, then, the effect of the vastness of an entire city slain by a two-kilometre-long warship hurled from orbit, and bearing thousands of tonnes of volatile chemicals and tactical warheads right into the city’s heart. I would be surprised if you can. The scalding air was thick enough to drown in.
Where once the Canticle City had been renowned throughout Eyespace for the shrieking hymns it broadcast above its towering skyline – screams of torturous ecstasy from the III Legion’s countless victims – that skyline simply didn’t exist any more. The only song to be heard now was the deafening rumble of the heaving earth, groaning in tectonic unrest outwards from the colossal crater in what had been the city’s political and strategic centre. Dust, ash and superheated steam was already thrusting skywards and beginning its inevitable spread across the continent. The wound I had dealt Harmony cast a shadow similar to that caused by the meteorite that extinguished the saurian reptiles of ancient Earth after their uninterrupted reign of thousands of millennia.
Yet horrific though this physical damage undoubtedly was, worse by far was the metaphysical trauma I had wrought upon the planet that day. In destroying Harmony’s population, I had given rise to thousands of daemons born in their last moments of helpless terror and searing pain, and it was through the perceptions of these malign entities that I was able to stalk the slag and rubble that was once the Canticle City.
All around me I could sense things of raw emotion and violated spirit: creatures of suffering, terror and melancholic delight. Silhouettes drifted through the murk around me. Most were too malformed to be even notionally human. Some seemed to stagger as they ghosted past, perhaps glutted on the horror that birthed them. Most others were hunched over, grit and pebbles clattering against their armoured hides in a torrential downpour as they devoured the charred remains of the dead city’s millions of slaves, servants, allies and lords, and drank their still-shrieking souls.
It was as if a monumental boil had been lanced and now the corruption was running free across the abused earth.
It was Abaddon’s voice that brought me back to myself once more.
‘How does it feel to kill a world with one blow, my brother?’
I managed a weak smile. ‘Exhausting.’
His golden eyes seemed to swallow light. Stars die that way, eating the illumination they once gave the galaxy.
‘Get to the boarding pods, Khayon. It’s almost time.’
I still did not obey. The first ships were rising from the surface now. They came without formation or order, fleeing their doomed planet. I lingered on the bridge as we opened fire on them, sending some back to the ground in flames, letting others p
ass untouched. If there was reason or rhyme in which targets felt the lash of our guns, it was a pattern beyond my understanding.
Abaddon either sensed or guessed my slow thoughts, answering them by nodding over at the Anamnesis in her place of authority and honour.
‘I am letting her slip the leash,’ he explained. ‘Letting our void goddess kill as she chooses. See how she thrives?’
Unrestrained and with a Gloriana’s guns obeying her every breath, the Anamnesis had a murderous poise she had lacked as the soul-core of the Tlaloc. She was the warship itself, the Vengeful Spirit personified, and it showed in every taut muscle and swipe of her hands raking through the aqua vitriolo. She had not been subsumed by the flagship’s machine-spirit. She had taken its arrogant brutality into herself. Abaddon was right. She thrived.
She was merciless with the enemy refugee ships, ripping them open with kill-shots from the prow lances again and again and again, far beyond the mathematical precision necessary to simply cripple or destroy them. She ravaged them. She gorged on them.
Abaddon allowed it. Encouraged it.
I had not seen Sargon. He emerged almost as if from Abaddon’s shadow, aiming his war maul at the occulus. His youthful features remained perfectly placid even here, where countless others among the crew were resorting to shouting above the din. Sargon, as ever, was the calm at the heart of the storm. It would be a tendency I would remark upon many times in the future.
Abaddon took note of the Word Bearer’s gesture and nodded. He mirrored it, aiming his plain soldier’s sword at the occulus, marking out one ship among a fleeing pack.
‘There.’
In tune with his choice, the ship’s rune began to throb a dull red in the tactical hololith. I read the spill of data as our auspex scanners latched on to this new prey.
The Pulchritudinous. Lunar-class cruiser, Halcyon-variant hull. III Legion. Born of the orbital docks above Sacred Mars.
‘Let the others run,’ Abaddon ordered.
The Anamnesis whirled in her tank, hands still curled into claws. ‘But–’
‘Let them run,’ Abaddon repeated. ‘You’ve toyed with your prey, Ultio. Focus on the Pulchritudinous. She’s the reason we’re here.’
‘I can kill her.’ Malevolence flavoured the tones of this new Anamnesis. ‘I can send her to the ground, torn open and aflame...’
‘You have your orders, Ultio.’
It looked as though she would resist, choosing to sate her own battle lust instead of obeying her new commander. But she relented. Her muscles loosened as she exhaled a vocalised breath across the bridge speakers.
‘I comply. Chase vector calculated.’
As the crew worked to make those orders a reality, Abaddon turned to me once more. ‘It’s time, Khayon. I need you ready if this has any hope of working.’
For the first time in recent memory I saluted a superior officer, fist thudding against my heart.
In the many thousands of years I have lived and fought and survived the wars that rage across our galaxy, I have long become accustomed to the dispassion of battle. Battle might stir the blood, especially when you face a hated foe, but a rush of adrenaline is not the same as chaotic passion. Emotion is acceptable. A lack of control is not.
One of the greatest strengths of the Black Legion is that war holds no mystique to us. We fight because we have something worth fighting for, not because we strive in fevered contest for the promise of intangible glory beneath the eyes of the Gods.
War is mundane to us. It is work. We have stripped it down to its bones, revealing it as nothing to fear and nothing to celebrate – it is simply our task, and one we must carry out with savage, veteran focus. The Black Legion’s martial virtues are not measured in how many skulls we take or how many worlds tremble at our name. Our pride lies in cold-blooded concentration, in ruthless efficiency, in winning every battle we can, no matter the cost.
Moments of individual triumph and hot-blooded glory still exist – we are still post-human warriors and thus slaved to the vestiges of human emotion we carry – but they are secondary to the Legion’s aims. It is not about sacrificing emotion and vitality, but about harnessing them to a greater end. The Legion is all. What matters is winning. Through such loyalty and unity, we do the work of our Legion and the work of the Warmaster, not the work of the Pantheon.
And after the battle? Let the Four Gods empower whomever they so choose. Let the Imperium demonise whomever among us that it wishes to curse. These concerns are for lesser men.
At least, such is our ideal. I would be lying if I claimed every Black Legion warlord was above such things. Like any faction or conquering force, we have a standard that not every soul is able to live up to. The Ezekarion fall short at times. I have taken the skulls from hard-fought battles more than once, or lost all pretence of patience and shouted my name and titles into the faces of cowering foes.
Even Abaddon has lapsed from the path over the course of the millennia. Revelation, as he is so fond of saying, is a process.
The taking of the Pulchritudinous shaped us even before we formally wore the Legion’s black. Abaddon spat on any notion of glory or renown. He struck with overwhelming force to achieve a single goal. No lingering in the skies above Harmony, cutting the enemy fleet into scrap and pounding every city into dust. No opening threats across the vox, demanding the surrender and submission of a weaker foe. He cast the enemy into disarray, then went for the throat. Victory above all else.
It had been so long since I fought for something other than survival. That, more than anything else, lingers in my mind from that day. I had brothers again. We had orders and a plan of attack. We had a shared purpose.
Of the battle itself, I will tell you this: it was blunt in its simplicity, though more ferocious than any of us had expected. Boarding actions are always savage affairs – one side fights with its back to the corner, the other fights almost wholly cut off from reinforcement. Some of the worst depredations of warfare I have ever seen have taken place in boarding engagements.
Barely recovered from my trance, weakened from the release of psychic forces and still with scarcely any idea of what the last few months had done to the Anamnesis, I made my way to the boarding pod cradles, ordering a squad of Rubricae to stay at my side. Telemachon, Nefertari and Gyre were waiting for me. My place was with them in the first wave.
There is little joy for me in what followed. Lies will serve no one at this late hour, and I have promised to speak the truth, so that is what I will do. Here, then, is the truth. Here is how the Black Legion was born, baptised in blood, at a cost I could never forgive.
SON OF HORUS
We struck the hull with a thunderclap’s force. Before the shivering had subsided, we were slamming release triggers and moving from our restraint thrones, counting each excruciating heartbeat. Drills and magna-meltas chewed their way through compacted adamantine alloys as, like a clinging tick, we bore our way down into the iron flesh of the Pulchritudinous.
‘Ten seconds,’ spoke the assault pod’s machine-spirit. Its voice emerged into the pod’s dark confines from three vox-gargoyles that looked to be sculpted in a scene of carving themselves open and dining on their own organs. Whatever significance that held was beyond me. I tried not to see it as an omen.
‘Five seconds,’ came the dull voice again.
I clutched my bolter, ready to take the lead. Other armoured bodies jostled me in the dark. I smelt the powdery musk of Nefertari’s wings and the chemical tang of Telemachon’s veins. Both of them were razor-keen and ripe with adrenaline. They stank of bloodlust. Mekhari and Djedhor were Mekhari and Djedhor – lifeless yet reassuring.
‘Breach, breach,’ stated the machine-spirit. ‘Breach, breach.’
The pod’s iris airlock swirled open on complaining hydraulics, revealing an empty corridor beyond. Telemachon looked to me for an answer.
I reached out with my senses, seeking the touch of souls nearby. Thoughts and memories met my questing awareness almost at once. A mess of humanity and monstrosity that sent me snapping back into my skull.
‘Mortals. A pack of them. Undisciplined.’
Telemachon thumbed the activation runes on three grenades. When he threw them, they ricocheted off the walls with musical clattering. The tangled mess of human emotion dissolved in the moans and shrieks that followed the explosions. Smoke flooded the corridor. Telemachon slipped out into it.
Follow, I bade my Rubricae.
We moved. Telemachon led us through the smoke at a dead run that forced the Rubricae to lean forwards in graceless stomping strides. Whatever alchemy was in the swordsman’s grenades clung to our ceramite with a resinous tenacity. The ashen stuff coated all of us, turning our armour a dull grey. Only the blades of our weapons were clean, their power fields crackling waspishly as they burned away any dirt.
More than once Telemachon looked back at me, and I sensed the tumult of emotion roiling behind his face mask. Restoring him to his former self had allowed him the capacity to feel his own God-heightened emotions again, but in freeing him I had lost any trust I felt in his presence.
Gyre kept pace with us. If ever I required reminding that she was not a true wolf, it showed in how untroubled she was by the sticky ash, even as it matted her fur and coated her unblinking eyes. She saw through other means than sight.
Nefertari was as ash-painted as the rest of us, though her crested, angular helm of alien manufacture cast a more distinctive silhouette. There was something beaked and raptorish about her helmet – for reasons I did not know she had crested it with a plume of white feathers. They were instantly filthy.
The Talon of Horus Page 31
