The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘We don’t answer to you, fleshcrafter. If any soul standing here should seek to justify his actions, it’s the one covered in human excrement and exhaling cancerous breath, proud of his role in breeding these abominations.’

  ‘Abominations,’ Fabius repeated, looking away to the nearest tanks. Aborted and malformed godlings stared back at him with the unquestioning love of children for their father. ‘You were always so narrow of vision, Ezekyle.’ He shook his head, the stringy white hair sticking to his grimy face. ‘Kill me then, Cthonian barbarian.’

  Abaddon spoke softly, as though we stood in a sacred cathedral rather than this pit of alchemical sin. His words were a challenge, but they were devoid of all bravado and all humour.

  ‘Not only do I not answer to you, Fabius, but you’ll find I’m quite intractable when it comes to obeying the orders of lunatics.’ He gestured to two of the Justaerin. ‘Vylo, Kureval. Take him.’

  The Terminators walked forwards. Their method of restraining the Primogenitor was brutally simple – they each gripped one of his arms in a massive power fist. The slightest pull would tear the Apothecary’s body apart.

  Abaddon turned to me, and I knew what he would ask before it left his lips.

  ‘End it, Khayon.’

  Fabius closed his eyes. For whatever it was worth, he had the dignity not to protest. I refused to take a last look around the chamber. Instead I saluted Abaddon as I silently spoke to my Rubricae.

  Leave nothing alive.

  A hundred bolters opened in the very same second, raining a tide of explosive fire across the laboratory. A second later the Justaerin and every other warrior present joined in. Glass shattered. Flesh burst. Metal detonated. Things that should never have been born wailed as they died. When the servitors were killed and the machinery was shattered by gunfire, my Rubricae and the others turned their bolters, cannons and flamers to the deck, hammering and charring the dying mutants with executioners’ fire.

  After an eternity, the guns fell quiet. Fluids dripped, steam rose and broken machinery sparked in the sudden stillness. The whole world smelt of the putrescent blood from false gods’ veins.

  Fabius was the one to break the silence. ‘You still solve every obstacle in your path with the mindless application of violence. Nothing has changed, has it, Ezekyle?’

  ‘Everything has changed, madman.’ He smiled at our prisoner, caressing Fabius’s cheek with a single scythe-claw. I thought he might peel the flesh from the Primogenitor’s face with one slice. I hoped he would. ‘Everything has changed.’

  More bootsteps echoed from the same annex chamber from which Fabius had emerged. A heavier tread. Measured, confident.

  The Apothecary’s watery stare focused on the weapon. ‘I see you carry the Talon. He will enjoy the irony of that.’

  Abaddon narrowed his eyes. ‘He?’

  ‘He,’ Fabius confirmed.

  And that is when we started to die.

  The mace was called Worldbreaker. The Emperor had made a gift of it to Horus upon the First Primarch’s ascension to Warmaster. Horus Lupercal was capable of bearing it one-handed, but the immense maul was too cumbersome for any of the Legiones Astartes to wield it with any grace. A bludgeon of darkened metal, its spiked head alone was the size of a warrior’s entire armoured torso.

  Worldbreaker smashed through the first rank of my Rubricae, sending three of them crashing against the shell-pocked walls. They did not just crash aside in boneless tumbles; they came apart at the joints, their entire suits of armour falling to pieces and clattering against the walls. Whatever sliver of their souls had remained bound by their armour was gone in the time it took me to breathe.

  Ashur-Kai felt it happen, as well. He had felt the Rubricae die in a way we had not believed possible.

  What in the Gods’ names is that? he sent to me in scholarly shock.

  For the shadow of a second it made no sense. All of the other cloned creatures were flawed and wrong. How could this... How...?

  I grasped after my link with Ashur-Kai. It... It is Horus Lupercal.

  Not a child cloned from scraps of tissue and drops of blood. Not an abomination half lost to mutation’s touch and trapped inside a containment tank. It was Horus Lupercal, the First Primarch, Lord of the Space Marine Legions. Perhaps a touch younger looking than when any of us had last seen him, and clearly devoid of the Pantheon’s touch. But still Horus Lupercal, cloned from cold flesh harvested directly from his stasis-preserved corpse, wearing the armour stripped from his dead body. Horus Lupercal, clad in his breathtaking black war-plate, replete with the long fall of his white-wolf fur cloak and the pale shimmer of a kinetic force field protecting him like a halo.

  It was Horus Lupercal, charging into our loose ranks and slaughtering us with Worldbreaker. He came from one of the far antechambers, awoken by Fabius in readiness for this moment.

  To their credit, Lheor and the last warriors of the Fifteen Fangs reacted faster than any of us. Their heavy bolters gave a leonine roar of throaty chatter, kicking and booming as they fired on the Warmaster of the Imperium, with every bolt hitting home. But even as their bolts tore at Horus’s armour and flesh, their initiative did little but doom them before the rest of us. Worldbreaker swung again, hurling four of them aside in a single blow. They struck the deck in ragged disarray. I felt Ugrivian die before he even hit the floor.

  We broke. Gods of the veil, of course we broke. We did not run, but we broke and fell back, scattering to the edges of the room to escape the war maul of this enraged revenant. My Rubricae, much slower than living warriors, marched back in their stately tread, barely pausing as they emptied magazine after magazine of warp-altered shells at the cloned primarch. And still they died with every swing. Gunfire shattered the primarch’s black ceramite and blew fist-sized chunks of flesh from his bones. Pain threaded his aura, yet Horus fought on.

  I threw energy at him. I threw lightning. I threw panic and hatred and anger in a seething bolt of mutagenic warpfire. It burst what remained of his force field in a whiplash of air pressure, and boiled the skin and hair from his head. Nothing more. I was still too weak, and he was far, far too strong.

  He came for me, then. I raised Saern only to have it smashed out of my hands, sent skidding across the filthy floor. His boot caved in my breastplate, hurling me to the deck. I felt ceramite shards knifing into my lungs as his foot hammered down, pinning me beneath him. I could not reach my cards to summon my bound daemons. Never had I needed the Ragged Knight as I needed him now.

  Nefertari took to the air, cutting past him and swinging with her klaive. She was a silken blur, moving faster than I had ever seen her move. Fast enough to weave between the bolt shells streaming around her, fast enough to slice through the primarch’s cheek, severing half of the muscles in his charred face. But he had weaved aside. She’d missed the killing blow. The female who had killed Legion warlords without shedding a single diamond of sweat had missed her killing blow. Horus was too fast, even for her.

  I screamed, not from my own pain but from what I saw next. The primarch’s hand closed around Nefertari’s ankle as she twisted in the air for another cut, and he dashed her against the deck. I sensed rather than heard the soft bones of her wings snapping like twigs on a forest floor. All sense of her vanished from my mind. Dead or unconscious, I knew not which. That in itself horrified me. She might be dead, murdered by this demigod, and I was too weak to tell.

  He broke Gyre next. My daemon wolf launched for his throat, her claws rending his breastplate as her jaws clamped where the muscles of his neck and shoulder met. She was in the line of fire, helplessly so. Bolt shells from a dozen sources exploded into her and around her, bursting her fur and flesh open. Yet she endured it. She endured it to distract Horus from finishing me, ripping tissue and tendons with every snap of her jaws, every shake of her head.

  Worldbreaker broke Gyre’s grip and crushed h
er skull, dropping her to the deck like a slab of butcher’s meat. Half of her head was simply gone, replaced by a cavernous hole and the spill of grey-red brain matter. Her mortal form began to dissolve, and with it I felt her presence drain from my mind, just as Nefertari’s had.

  Horus turned to me once more – pain, fury and wild-eyed hate radiated from what little remained of his face. I struggled to rise, to move, to do anything, but there was no strength left in me. Worldbreaker rose and fell.

  Another figure slammed into Horus’s side, breaking his balance and causing him to stagger sideways as a fresh volley of bolter shells hammered home. The blade that deflected my death in a shower of sparks was my own blade, my axe, Saern, held fast by one of my Rubricae.

  Iskandar, it sent, more clearly and more present in my mind than I’d experienced from any of the ashen dead since the night of their curse. I recognised that voice.

  Mekhari...

  Iskandar, he replied. Not in a Rubricae’s hiss, but a man’s voice. Mekhari had pulsed to me. To my eternal regret, I was too stunned to reply.

  He straightened.

  My brother. My captain. His voice was clearer. More certain, more determined. He turned his featureless gaze back to Horus who, despite the bolter shells exploding all around and over him, had somehow managed to regain his balance to advance on us.

  Telemachon’s twin swords burst through the front of Horus’s ruined breastplate in a spray of almost toxically rich blood. Without a pause, and faster than even Telemachon could withdraw them, Horus grabbed the blades in a single gauntleted fist, snapped them, then spun around and backhanded the swordsman across the chamber. Telemachon hammered into the far wall with the telltale resonant crash of ceramite.

  Mekhari raised my axe again, stepping towards the raging demigod.

  Farewell, he sent, in my mind.

  Worldbreaker slammed through the axe I had carried since the death of my home world. Saern shattered in Mekhari’s hands, his armour exploded like pottery, and then... he was gone. Truly gone. As gone as Ugrivian.

  My brothers had bought me time to roll away, though not nearly far enough. Horus turned on me, all beauty in his bearing now lost to injury and anger. Try as he might, he had not killed me. I lived, though it had cost me everything.

  Looming over me, he raised Worldbreaker again, ready to end me as he had the others. A voice stopped him. A single commanding word that cut through the sounds of battle, stopping everything. Even the gunfire fell silent.

  ‘Enough.’

  Abaddon stood behind Horus. He had not screamed the word. He had barely even raised his voice. The absolute authority in Abaddon’s tone was all he required. In his armour Abaddon was the equal of his father’s clone, both in stature and in the fury he emanated. The Warmaster’s name is whispered as a curse on a million worlds in this last, dark millennium, with many Imperial peasants – those who are even aware of the events that shaped our empire – believing Abaddon to be Horus’s cloned son. It would not surprise those superstitious souls to learn that, in that moment as they both stood before me, only their wounds and their armament set them apart. In all else, they were twins.

  Horus turned in a blur, Worldbreaker swinging in an arc faster than a weapon of its size and weight should ever be able to move. Abaddon not only parried the mace, he caught it. He held it. He gripped it in that great Talon stained with the blood of a god and His angel.

  Father and son faced each other, breathing spite into each other’s snarling features. For the first time, the primarch spoke. Spit stringed between his teeth. They were clean and unmarked, not etched with Cthonian hieroglyphs as Abaddon’s were.

  ‘That. Is. My. Talon.’

  Abaddon closed his fist. Worldbreaker broke as Saern had broken, shattering against a superior weapon. Scrap metal fell from Abaddon’s scythed fingers.

  I have heard the stories of this moment. Perhaps even you, here in the deepest depths of the Imperium, have heard them as well. Every warband has their own reflection of these events.

  Many are the tales of Horus’s last words; his entreaties to his gathered sons and nephews; how he gave a glorious speech about the possibilities of a new era, or how he begged for mercy when faced with Justaerin blades. There are even stories that swear Horus was swollen with the blessings of the Pantheon as he was in the last days of the Terran War, and that the Gods themselves had resurrected their fallen champion.

  But I was there. There were no touching last words or rousing speeches, and the Gods, if present at all, remained silent and aloof. Life rarely grants us the same theatre as we find in legends. So I promise you this, as the account of one who was there that day: there was no divine champion granted sacred rebirth. There was no impassioned judgement delivered by Abaddon as destiny changed hands from one Warmaster to the next.

  There was a cloned father and a prodigal son, surrounded by the dead and the wounded, so similar that only by their weapons and wounds could I tell them apart. That, and their different smiles.

  Horus gave a conqueror’s smirk from what remained of his face. Recognition, true recognition, flared in the only eye he had left.

  ‘Ezekyle.’ His voice was a breath of relief and revelation. ‘It’s you. It’s you, my brother.’

  Time stood still. After everything that had taken place, I thought – against all reason and rhyme – that they would embrace as kindred.

  ‘My son,’ said the primarch. ‘My son.’

  All five of Abaddon’s claws rammed so deeply into Horus’s chest that they burst from his back. The scythes pushed out the stunted remains of Telemachon’s swords, sending the broken blades clattering against the floor.

  Dark redness spread across what was left of the white fur cloak draped in tatters across Horus’s shoulders. A genetic god’s blood rained down over me. I felt like laughing without knowing why. Shock, perhaps. Shock and naked relief.

  The storm bolter on the Talon’s back kicked three times, burying six bolts inside Horus’s exposed chest and neck. They blasted him apart from within, adding viscera to the blood slopping across those of us left prone.

  And that was how they stood, as gold flared in the eyes of one and life faded from the eyes of the other. Horus’s knees buckled but Abaddon would not let him fall. Horus’s mouth worked but no sound came forth. If his last words found any voice, Abaddon was the only one to hear it.

  I was fortunate that day. Not just because I survived a battle with a demigod that should never have been fought, but because I heard Abaddon’s last words to his father. With a slow, smooth withdrawal, he pulled the Talon clear of his father’s body, and the moment before Horus fell – the moment before the light finally went out in the primarch’s eyes – Abaddon whispered five soft words.

  ‘I am not your son.’

  THIS LAST AND DARKEST MILLENNIUM

  999.M41

  And so, the first part of our tale comes to an end. Thoth’s quill may rest for a time, as my hosts pore over these words and seek weakness between the dictated lines. But I doubt it will rest for long. They will want more. They have been told of the Black Legion’s genesis, now they will ask of its birth and first battles, as well as the Thirteen Crusades that followed. There is still so much to tell. So many wars won and lost; so many brothers and enemies fallen into memory.

  After the Canticle City came the Illumination, when we battled those who would not swear allegiance to the Warmaster and sought to end our rise. During that era we traversed the Empire of the Eye, ending the Legion Wars with our ascendance above the Nine, and one by one the primarchs bowed before Abaddon. Some willingly, some only grudgingly, and one who had to be brought to his knees. But all of them bowed in the end: Lorgar, Perturabo, Fulgrim, Angron, my father Magnus... even Mortarion, who came closest of all to slaying us through his holy plagues.

  And after that came our First Crusade. Imperial record remembers it as t
he first time the Nine Legions broke free of the Eye and returned to the galaxy in strength against an unprepared Imperium. The Nine Legions remember it for the triumph at Uralan, when the Warmaster claimed his daemon blade, Drach’nyen.

  We of the Ezekarion have a different recollection – or, at least, one with a profoundly different focus. Perhaps the new regents of the Imperium did not expect our return and so were unprepared to face us, but not all of the Emperor’s servants had forgotten its wayward sons.

  I can see him still: that ancient Templar-king sitting upon a throne of hand-carved bronze, his armoured fingers laced around the hilt of his great blade. I remember how, to my secret sight, his immense pride and his absolute faith in our grandsire turned his aura into a raging halo of pearl and gold.

  ‘So, you have returned.’ His voice was deep, as old as time itself, yet uncracked by the years it carried. ‘I never doubted you would.’

  He rose smoothly from his throne, his back straight, the Sword of the High Marshals held loosely in one fist. By that point he was a veteran of more than a thousand years. Age had ravaged him, yet he burned with life.

  Abaddon stepped forward then, gesturing silently for us to lower our weapons. He inclined his head in respectful greeting.

  ‘I see time has blackened your armour as it has ours.’

  The ancient Templar descended the three steps from his throne, his gaze fixed on the Warmaster’s face.

  ‘I looked for you. As Terra burned in the fires of your father’s heresy, I hunted for you, day and night. Always lesser men blocked my way. Always they died so that you might live.’

  He came to a halt no more than two metres from Abaddon.

  ‘I have never stopped searching for you, Ezekyle. Not through all these long years.’

  Abaddon bowed then, with no hint of mockery. Not in his eyes, nor in his heart. Ezekyle has always cherished valiant foes, and none were more valiant than this knight.