The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  My bloodward was festooned with weaponry. Exotic pistols and cut-short alien carbines were buckled to her armour plating. In her hands she held a curved blade almost as tall as the maiden herself – a klaive, rare even among her kind, its shimmering sides etched with twisting hieroglyphs. Despite the dullness of her Commorraghan aura, I sensed her excitement at being free at last: free to hunt, free to taste pain, free to quench her unending soul-thirst. Eldar excitement has a strange psychic resonance. Hers had an unhealthy sweetness, like honey on the back of the tongue.

  ‘My vox-link to the ship is corrupted,’ Telemachon spoke over our suit-to-suit proximity link.

  ‘As is mine.’

  Ashur-Kai?

  Khayon? My apprentice?

  It has been a long time since you called me that.

  Forgive a former mentor’s concern. After your feat of telekinetic prowess with the Tlaloc, I worried that you would be weak for months to come. But we shall speak of such things later.

  We shall. Inform Abaddon we are... Wait. Wait.

  Telemachon held up his hand, halting us as we emerged from the aura of the smoke grenades. A creature, part Neverborn, part lab-forged monstrosity, prowled the deck ahead, coming closer in a ragged stoop, its three limbs ill-suited for movement, for each one was a chitinous, jointed blade. The first thing I discerned was that it had no eyes, tracking by snuffing the air. The second thing I saw was that its organs were on the outside of its flesh.

  Ashur-Kai had not been wrong. I hated the weakness still coursing through me. After scarcely moving in months, the frailty in my aching muscles was to be expected, but a man has his pride. I had been a warrior-commander for most of my life. To be escorted and defended by my kindred on a mission I could have done alone was a slight against my dignity.

  The creature ambled closer, eyelessly huffing at the air. Saern was wearyingly heavy in my hands. Without thinking, I summoned strength by letting the warp seep through my enfeebled flesh, rejuvenating me.

  The moment I felt the relieving touch of fresh strength, the creature turned its elongated head towards me. The flesh of its faceless visage peeled open in a puncturing hole, sucking in air with great, wet heaves.

  Who who who who who

  Nefertari moved before I could. She launched forwards, her klaive singing with electrical discharge. The creature’s head clanged to the deck, decaying rapidly into pulpy slush. The body followed suit, spasming as it melted. We moved on, weapons at the ready.

  Inform Abaddon we are almost ready.

  He looks impatient, Khayon.

  Then relay my message and set him at ease, old one.

  ‘They can smell you,’ Telemachon said softly, without looking back.

  ‘I will be more careful.’

  ‘Not you, Khayon. Her.’

  I looked to my bloodward. Nefertari’s wide, wide smile was the most inhuman expression she had ever worn. Ichor fizzled away along the killing edge of her klaive.

  ‘We face the children of the Youngest God,’ Telemachon continued. ‘They smell her soul.’

  The swordsman led the way. We fought again and again, always killing the creatures that confronted us before they could flee or shriek for aid. Those that reared up and faced us were brought down by Gyre’s fangs, Telemachon’s blade, and Nefertari’s klaive. I reluctantly conserved my strength for the effort yet to come. That in itself was a trial.

  All the while, the hull shook around us – first with weapon impacts from the Vengeful Spirit, and then with the Pulchritudinous’s own guns helplessly returning fire.

  ‘Who commands this ship?’ I asked Telemachon.

  ‘Primogenitor Fabius.’ There was no missing the revulsion in the swordsman’s voice. ‘We do not call it the Pulchritudinous. We call it the Fleshmarket.’

  ‘Delightful.’

  ‘Be glad we’re boarding it now, when all is in chaos after the evacuation. This a fortress of horrors, sorcerer. If the Primogenitor had prepared for us, we would already be dead.’

  Even so, we faced no shortage of resistance just from the foulness left to wander and rot in the ship’s halls. Nefertari wet her klaive in every passageway, butchering her way through bonecrafted human thralls and monstrous Neverborn that reeked of alchemical meddling. Living in the underworld tends to steal your capacity to feel shock at any creature’s physical form, but these were a sickening blend of human, mutant and Neverborn – rotting while alive, stinking of natural and unnatural excretion alike. Ichor, pus and warp-crafted chemicals ran like tears down stitched and swollen faces.

  I held up the severed head of something that had been human before it was ‘gifted’ with three rows of filed teeth on its upper and lower jaws. It still stared at me with its remaining eye, its altered mouth biting uselessly in my direction.

  Eat eat eat eat

  With my grip in its hair, I smashed the head open against the closest wall.

  In several corridors we faced fully human crew armed with zeal in their purpose and devotion to their masters, but little that could actually do us harm. They had two ways of playing war’s games: either to charge in herds of sweating, screaming flesh or stand in scattered ranks and open fire with pistols, autoguns and slug rifles.

  Do not mistake this behaviour for courage. An Imperial Guardsman standing his ground, consigning his soul to the Emperor and shouting defiance at us as we butcher our way through his trenches – that is courage. Futile and misplaced it may be, but it is undeniably courage.

  What met us in those halls was tortured madness in rags, with the fanaticism of fools writ plain across their mutilated faces. They screamed for the notice of their masters, for the blessings of the Youngest God, for the luck necessary to live through the death that walked among them. Many warbands go into battle with herds of such bolter fodder around them. They are useful for any number of tactical tasks, not least forcing the enemy to waste ammunition and weary themselves in destroying the loyal wretches. We use them now in the Black Legion, hordes of them spreading out across the battlefield before our armies, driven on by the fearsome chants of our apostles and warpriests.

  Courage exists in abundance among our human and mutant followers, make no mistake. But not there, not that day aboard the Pulchritudinous. These were the dregs of servitude and failed experimentation, dragged aboard an evacuating ship by their fleeing masters.

  Telemachon and I took the vanguard, wading into an iron wall of small calibre fire. It broke against my armour like hailstones on a tank’s plating. Our softer armour joints were more vulnerable – a pinprick stabbed into the joint of my right elbow as a bullet hit home. Another pinched at the side of my neck, becoming a pulse of stinging pressure against my spine. They were irritants, wearying me further. Not serious. Not lethal.

  The warp flowed through me in operatic crescendo. I was scarcely guiding it. Control took care and concentration, and I was too weak to muster much of either virtue. When I released the tides of unseen power down the dark hallways, it burst through the unresisting flesh of the III Legion’s slaves in spines of bone and sloughing puddles of skin. Mutation, unchecked and unborn from any emotion, erupted among them.

  We did not stop to put those things of boiling flesh and warping bone out of their misery. They sealed their fates the moment they raised weapons against us.

  Telemachon led the way unerringly. The homogenisation of Imperial technology should have been an aid to us, with one Lunar-class cruiser structured the same as any other, but I was soon disoriented. The ship’s innards were a labyrinth, though whether it was the result of my weariness or the work of the warp, I cannot say for certain. It took us far longer than I anticipated before we finally reached a chamber large enough for the next stage of Abaddon’s plan. A Lunar-class cruiser operates at a full crew complement of over ninety thousand souls. I felt as though we had murdered our way through every single one of them.
r />   ‘Do it,’ said Telemachon.

  I bristled at his tone. Tired or not, killing fire serpentined across my fingers, hissing as it superheated the air around my hands.

  ‘Do it please,’ Telemachon corrected with saccharine indulgence. He came very close to dying in that moment.

  I breathed out my anger and lifted Saern.

  Ashur-Kai?

  I am ready, Khayon. I carved down, ripping a wound in the air. Elsewhere in orbit above the dying world, Ashur-Kai did the same.

  I expected Lheor and Ugrivian to appear first through the conduit, or perhaps Falkus if his choler could not be contained. I had not expected one of the Neverborn.

  The weakling thing fell from the tear in reality as if hurled from the portal, its scaled flesh breaking open with the force it struck the deck. Before any of us could react, an immense black boot hammered the creature’s head into sludge.

  Abaddon stepped through the conduit. The joint snarls of his Terminator war-plate were the throttle roars of straining tank engines. Veins ran black beneath his sallow skin. His gaze burned with psychic gold. In one hand he carried his battered power sword. In the other he... he...

  I recoiled from him as he strode forth. The claws of his right hand were scythe blades still ringing with the resonance of the Emperor’s murder. He was wearing the Talon. He had boarded the ship wearing the Talon of Horus.

  Its effect was almost as punishing as the first time he had revealed it. Its nearness overwhelmed me, filling my skull with the copper reek of Sanguinius’s supernatural blood and the whispers of thousands upon thousands of his sons across the galaxy, suffering with genetic defects in the wake of their primarch’s death. I could hear every single one of them – hear the prayers in their hearts, hear their growled devotions and whispered mantras.

  But I did not fall, and I did not kneel. I kept my feet, facing my brother who bore the weapon that had killed a primarch and the Emperor within the same hour. In the years to come, when I would struggle to look at him because of his insidious daemon blade and the eternal singing of the Pantheon’s choirs praising him in worship, I would always remember this as the first moment he became my Warmaster as well as my brother.

  Behind him came the hulking forms of Falkus and the Justaerin, shadows coalescing into reality as they passed through the conduit.

  ‘Why did you bring that?’ I asked, catching my breath from the lightning claw’s oppressive shroud. Such was the strength of its spirit that it projected an aura like a living being.

  Abaddon lifted the great Talon, closing and opening the scythe blades with murderous theatre.

  ‘The poetry of the moment, Khayon. With my father’s own weapon, I will destroy all hope of his rebirth. Now... Where’s that mongrel dog who calls himself “Primogenitor”?’

  I will not waste ink on the needless details of that brief battle. Suffice to say that with thirty Justaerin, six World Eaters and one hundred Rubricae, we slaughtered everything alive on that ship between where we came aboard and where we found Primogenitor Fabius. The warship’s halls ran with blood and filth, runnels of it straining through to the lower decks, raining gore on the slaves too wise to stand against us.

  Squads of Emperor’s Children took position at critical junctures to defend their master’s vessel, pouring bolter fire down the corridors at the Justaerin vanguard. Bolts strike Terminator plate with the echoing clang of a hammer at the forge; hundreds of bolts striking makes the very noise of Hell itself. Into this withering blizzard of explosive bolts, Falkus and his warriors advanced. Tusks and horns broke away, leaving bloody wounds in their wake. Armour shards were blasted clear, revealing the mutated flesh beneath. Still they walked, implacable, over the bodies of their fallen brethren. Those who stood against them died beneath claws and hammers, each falling blow ending a life precious to the Youngest God. Those who fled bought their lives at the cost of pride. Forever would we remember the crew of the Fleshmarket who broke and ran before the Justaerin’s grinding charge.

  Abaddon led them, killing with his sword and the double-barrelled bolter mounted on the Talon’s bulk. But the claw’s blades, still stained with Sanguinius and the Emperor’s lives, remained unsullied.

  The Warmaster’s laughter echoed down the hallways. He did not mean it in petty mockery, I know that, even if our enemies likely took it as such. Battle-joy and fraternity flowed through him, enriching his aura. How long had it been since he marched to war with his brothers? Too long, too long.

  This was Abaddon in his element, a battle-king, leading from the front. We stood at his side, killing as he killed, moving amidst the Justaerin as if we belonged among them. They encouraged us. They welcomed us. We were all one that night, wading through hordes of alchemically altered wretches lining up for the butcher’s blade.

  Gods of the warp, it took me months to cleanse the stink of that ship from my senses.

  Only when we reached the apothecarion did our march finally break stride. All of us were long since inured to horror, so it was not the abundance of flesh heresy taking place inside those chambers that brought us to a halt. The walls were beribboned with racks of preserved human meat, organ containment jars, surgical tools – it was a laboratory set up within an abattoir, and its gory, soiled majesty surprised none of us. We expected nothing less from the wayward visionaries and genetic mages of the III Legion.

  What brought us to a halt was that the overseer of this place had succeeded. This was not the laboratory of those who were struggling and failing to manipulate one of the most arcane and flawed sciences. This was the sanctum of madmen who had already succeeded.

  From my first step into the chamber I realised it; it was in my very first breath of blood-fouled air. We had been wrong all this time. The Emperor’s Children were not unknowable years away from a cloning genesis. They had already mastered that darkest lore. We were not here as saviours, ready to purge this place before an abomination could be done. We were far too late for that.

  Even Abaddon, so possessed by battle lust moments before, came to a dead halt. He stared at the blood-strewn surgical tables and the great sustaining tanks that contained half-formed perversions of life. Servitors and mind-dead thralls drifted between the machinery, tending to it all with a tenderness that had no place in this feculent nursery.

  Here was the Emperor’s sacred genetic project rebuilt through daemonic lore and gutter genius. Row upon row of life pods contained mutated children and deformed adolescents, each with a feature or two that we just barely recognised. One of the palest child-creatures was melded to a smear of biological matter coating one wall of its tank. It reached out from where it was trapped in this fusion of mutated flesh, beckoning me closer. The intelligence in its stare made my skin prickle under the touch of ice. Worse was the familiarity of its features, and the affection in its gaze.

  Khayon, it sent to me, smiling through the faecal murk.

  I backed away, weapons held in tightening fists.

  ‘What is it?’ Nefertari asked. She was the only one not gripped by disgust or dread. To her, this was yet another stupid game played by mon-keigh blood magicians. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Lorgar.’ I aimed Saern at the half-melted infant in the dirty life pod. ‘That is Lorgar.’

  Sensing my unease, my Rubricae stalked closer, seeking to ring me in a protective circle. I ordered them away with a distracted pulse.

  In another of the filthy tanks, full to the brim with oxygenated muck in place of amniotic fluid, a floating human infant – white of hair and dark of gaze – watched our every movement with wide, knowing eyes. It was one of the few unruined experiments, appearing outwardly perfect. That did nothing to ease my disgust.

  ‘God of War,’ Lheor cursed at the sight.

  Telemachon dropped slowly to his knees before the child. ‘Fulgrim,’ he whispered. ‘My father.’

  ‘Get up,’ I said to him.
‘Get back.’

  The child-primarch slammed itself against the glass, expelling venom in a spreading black cloud from the roof of its mouth. A forked tongue lashed in futility, licking slime from the inner surface of its life-support prison. Telemachon stumbled back.

  The chamber had room for hundreds of tanks. Many sockets were empty, the majority housed thrumming life pods with barely visible limbs moving through the carrion water. This chamber alone represented heresy beyond measure. Was there more? Was this all the Primogenitor had been able to evacuate from Harmony?

  We turned at the sound of power-armoured bootsteps. The Apothecary approached us unarmed, wearing the white and purple of the Emperor’s Children nearly lost beneath what looked like years of encrusted blood and blossoming mould. The overrobe was likewise stained with unnameable filth. Thinning white hair hung to his shoulders, now all that was left of a once regal mane. He was no older than many other legionaries, yet he looked utterly ravaged by time. Even so, I recognised him, as did we all.

  Abaddon spoke for us. ‘The years have been unkind to you, Chief Apothecary Fabius.’

  Fabius exhaled a sigh. Even his breath was foul – a warm wind of infected gums and tumour-spotted lungs. Plainly he experimented upon himself as frequently as he did his prisoners, and not all of his experiments were successful.

  ‘Ezekyle.’ He made a lament of my brother’s name. ‘Ezekyle, you cannot even begin to imagine the horror you have wrought upon me this day.’

  His declaration moved us to silence, not out of respect but blind shock that he would even seek to entreat us to take his side with sympathy.

  ‘The damage to my work... I lack the words to frame it in terms you would ever understand. With wanton, useless violence you have done indescribable damage to my work. Centuries of study, Ezekyle. Lore that could never be copied, now lost forevermore. And for what, son of Horus? I ask you, for what?’

  Even Abaddon, who had seen all Hell had to offer, was rocked to his core by what he saw all around us. It took him a moment to summon the words necessary for a reply.