Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  The spear was now bent, rendering it useless. The creature left it in its kinsman’s chest and turned to the others drawing closer in the stinking, crashing darkness. It could kill one of them, perhaps two, but dozens of red eyes gleamed back in the gloom. Jagged war-shrieks and more human-sounding cries of anger and fear sounded out through the dark.

  The creature did not fight its kinsmen. It turned from them, took three running steps and hurled itself into the pounding, rattling mechanics of the closest machine station. The pistons slammed. The gears ground. The creature’s final thought, not surprisingly, was washed red with panic and pain. The machine slowed momentarily, then chewed through the obstruction.

  This happened again and again. One of the creatures would erupt into sudden violence, killing without warning, striking down those at its side. Several simply threw themselves into the jaws of struggling mechanical engines.

  Within the space of a single minute, eleven of the machines had stalled, jammed by dense clogs of flesh and bone.

  In one of the spires, a legionary overseeing the work of high-level functionary slaves stared unblinking at a console that started to flash with red warning signs. He was already dying when the console’s alert runes began flashing, suffering catastrophic ischemic shock as a ­carnival of messy embolisms savaged his brain.

  The Space Marine – a warrior named Elath Dastarenn – remained standing. He stood slack-mouthed, dead-eyed, and keyed in several codes to deactivate the console’s warning sigils, silencing the terminal from reporting its findings elsewhere.

  I believe he said something mumbled and meaningless as his synapses flared those final times. Whatever the wordless murmur was supposed to mean, I cannot speculate. Bodies, and the brains that drive them, do strange things as they die.

  The legionary holding the rank of Armsmaster ceased speaking halfway through addressing his squad. He drew his sidearm in a slow snarl of arm servos, placed the bolt pistol’s mouth against his left eye and discharged a bolt directly into the front of his skull.

  Atop one of the gunship platforms, a crew of mutant thralls braved the toxic gases with rheumy eyes and blood-pocked rebreathers, working to refuel a Thunderhawk. One of them unlimbered a crude flamer from beneath her cloak, a weapon she did not have the clearance to possess. She had spent several days building it piece by piece, despite lacking the intelligence to do so, and now brought it forth to bathe her companions in a roar of semi-liquid fire.

  She ignored her flailing, dying herdmates, even when one of them crashed into her and ignited her gas-soaked clothing. Aflame now, she pushed the nozzle of the jury-rigged short-burst flamer against the refuelling port of the grounded gunship, but nothing emerged when she pulled the trigger. Her last act was to thrust her burning arm directly into the hole that opened into the promethium tank.

  I saw the explosion just under a minute later from where I watched, several kilometres away on a low ridge.

  On several other towers, anti-aircraft cannons rotated and lowered, no longer scanning the low atmosphere for threats, instead tracking the flight paths of the fighter wing patrolling above the ramparts. The servitor-brains inside these turrets would later be found boiled alive in their suspension-fluid cradles. Long before that, however, they spat volley after volley of cannon fire into the sky, bringing down most of their own aerial defences.

  The primary cannon – an anti-orbital annihilator fusillade – ­detonated in the middle of this treacherous display due to its fifty-strong crew of mono-tasked servitors acting without orders, overriding all fail-safes and overloading the poorly maintained power cells set in the weapon’s foundations. The three tech-priests tasked with overseeing the primary cannon’s function had slaughtered one another without warning or reason, acting in cold and calculating silence, effectively abandoning their servitor wards.

  I saw this explosion as well. It was considerably brighter than the first.

  Power began to fail across the fortress. Partly this was because of slave crews turning on one another. Partly it was due to the sabotage of several power generators. And partly it was because one of Daravek’s own elite warriors, the legionary’s armour heaving to contain the disease-bloated flesh within, had fused several melta charges to his own body and detonated them at the tri-cortex plasma locomotor that controlled coolant for the fortress’ entire reactor district beneath the planet’s surface.

  An uprising began in the fortress’ depths when a legionary powered down and deactivated the prisoner cells, flooding the lower levels of the castle with warp spawn, devolved mutants and mortal captives who were being kept as food. The legionary cut his own throat with his chainsword before he witnessed the fruits of this labour, and the vox speakers in his gorget that demanded reports heard nothing but his last breaths gurgling through his destroyed vocal cords.

  Several legionaries rampaged through the warband’s barracks and armouries, butchering their unprepared brethren and slaughtering arming slaves. Each of these wayward warriors was inevitably killed in turn by his brothers, but not before each had done what damage he could. Within each victorious squad, another warrior would then turn on his brethren without warning, unloading a boltgun at point-blank range into the backs and heads of his brothers, or carving limbs from bodies with a power sword before being finished by the survivors.

  Dying daemons clawed their way from several of these corpses, their soulless lives extinguished on the floor by the bodies of those they had possessed. Others I simply abandoned where they fell, moving my senses and consciousness to the next warriors whose souls I had spent months studying in preparation for this night.

  One by one, death by death.

  I remember every man, woman and child whose mind I touched, whose body I puppeteered, whose flesh I gouged out hollow as a haven for a daemonic parasite, purely because of what I am. A legionary’s brain is sculpted to retain everything from the moment of his awakening as a Space Marine to the second of his demise.

  Far from the fortress, I was sweating in my armour and chanting, endlessly chanting, hunched in the confines of a crawl hole I had dug with my bare hands. Even with my consciousness free of my body, I felt my physical form reacting to the pressures I was placing upon it with such a protracted psychic sending: the ache of my over-bent spine; the tickle of saliva running from my moving mouth; the painful spasms of my twitching fingers.

  Months and months of preparation had led to this moment. Soul by soul, being by being, I moved through the fortress, touching some minds as a mere caress, amplifying their basest instincts and spurring them to bloodshed. Others, those I had silently and unknowingly prepared over the many months, I plunged myself into, knife-like and savage, tearing their consciousnesses into mist, overriding the function of their muscles and bones with my will.

  Even among those I had been spying upon for months, hollowing out for this specific purpose, resistance was tenacious. I was weary and their souls were strong, and rather than waste time seeking to overcome them I would move onto others. I was too focused on my work to keep track of every failed attempt, but in more than one district of the fortress my attempts to rally the slaves against their masters failed, as did my attempts to force the Death Guard to butcher their slaves.

  It was working, though.

  Bulkheads that led to avenues of escape were sealed and over­ridden with their mechanical processes shot. Corridors were collapsed with explosives. Gunships that managed to lift off were brought down by fire from the battlements. Section by section, district by district, the fortress was cast into darkness and pitched into disorder. A year’s work, all culminating in a single evening. The jaws of the trap slowly closed.

  It was not perfect, but by the lies of the Shifting Many, it was close. So damn close.

  Soon it was time to hunt Daravek. I sank my unseen claws into one last prepared and vulnerable mind, tearing his shrieking, violated thoughts free and binding my own
in place. I settled into this new host, gathered my strength and waited.

  Daravek was by no means easy prey, and he was anything but a fool. He had reacted with precision and competence, moving through the fortress himself, quelling the uprisings through the brutality of his axe and by ordering entire sections of the fortress sealed, flooding them with alchemical toxins to extinguish any living resistance. It might have worked had the sections actually been sealed, but many of his unit leaders and subcommanders were mind-eaten wrecks that failed to comply with his orders, or were murdered by their subordinates before they could act. In many cases, they were dead before they could even receive his orders.

  But despite all my preparation, I was building an uncontrollable fire in haste and with imperfect tools. Daravek felt my nearness. He knew what was happening, knew this was the payment for resisting Abaddon’s past approach and offer of alliance. He had seen this before. Not on this scale, not to this degree of precision, but he knew the hand that held this blade.

  ‘Khayon is here,’ he had said.

  He halted his massacring advance in one of his ritual chambers, demanding answers from the remaining bodyguards at his side. They endured this with stoic, regal loyalty.

  When his eyes locked to mine, I felt the toxicity of his breath against my mutated face. ‘Tychondrian,’ he said to me. ‘You, brother?’

  I snarled a denial through a fanged mouth that the warp had mangled and reshaped into something of absolute lethality.

  ‘No, lord.’

  He laughed. By the Pantheon, he was enjoying this. ‘You could all be lying, you worthless wretches. Nevertheless, the day is far from done. We must get into orbit. We will go where Abaddon’s mongrel cannot pursue.’

  The chamber shook once more with the discord I had orchestrated across the fortress. Daravek turned away from me, levelling his gaze upon the next warrior of his inner circle. All I had to do was shift my stance, lengthening my shadow beneath the flickering glare of the overhead lights so that it touched Daravek’s in lightless union.

  I forced my psychic command into that patch of conjoined darkness.

  Now.

  Prosperine lynxes, extinct with the annihilation of my home world, were ill-named for comparative purposes. Before their destruction, they had resembled the equally extinct Ancient Terran tigrus-cat or the sabre-toothed smyladon rather than any other feline: hugely muscled, bulky with strength and speckle-striped in natural warning to ward off other predators. However, they eclipsed even those prehistoric beasts in size. A Prosperine lynx’s great head, with an arsenal of spear-tip teeth, would reach the height of a Legiones Astartes warrior’s breastplate.

  That is what leapt from Thagus Daravek’s shadow. Claws first, the beast melted out of the darkness and launched, roaring, onto the warlord’s back in a move of impossible agility.

  In shape it was a Prosperine lynx, but in form it was purely daemonic. This creature possessed neither flesh nor blood, and its fur – black and striped with lighter grey – was closer to smoke than hair. Its claws were the length of gladii and formed from volcanic glass. Its eyes were the kind of white that burns.

  I was moving the moment it struck. I spun to the warrior next to me, igniting the lightning claws I wore as gauntlets. I could – should – have slaughtered two of the other bodyguards before they could react, but I was slowed by the unfamiliar might of the Terminator war-plate around me. Nor were cumbersome lightning claws my weapon of preference. I carved through the closest Death Guard only for the blades to lodge within the corpse for precious seconds. When I dragged them free, my chance to slaughter Daravek was lost – though he still thrashed beneath the daemon-cat’s weight and fury, his other bodyguards now moved between us.

  Reality bleached down to flashes of instinct and insight, cutting, weaving aside, swinging left and right with the cumbersome claws. Despite my gouging Tychondrian’s consciousness free of his flesh, his body still resisted my control. He had been stronger than I expected. That made me slow.

  Tychondrian’s body was a limping, bleeding ruin by the time I reached Daravek. Scarce seconds had passed, but it was an assassin’s eternity, where every heartbeat counted. The taste of failure was already running its bitter way over my tongue. I knew, facing the embattled Daravek as he wrestled with the thrashing, snarling lynx, that I lacked the strength to finish him from within Tychondrian’s shredded form.

  Nagual, I sent. Even my silent voice was ravaged. Tychondrian was dying, the distraction of weakness rather than pain flooding through his fading muscles and slowing his internal organs. I was down on one knee, unable to force myself back up as the body died around me. Nagual… Finish him…

  Master, the lynx sent back in acknowledgement.

  Not a word in truth, just a ripple of awareness, yet the lynx was struggling alone. Daravek gushed a flood of alchemical flame from his wrist projectors, bathing the creature that thrashed upon his back and shoulders like a living cloak. Nagual’s smoky corpus caught fire, and the beast vanished.

  Suddenly unbalanced without the daemon’s weight, Daravek took a moment to turn and stabilise himself. In the same second, the daemonic feline roared from my shadow, leaping out to crash into the Death Guard warlord once more.

  Cannot kill alone, sent Nagual as his fangs scraped sparks across the ceramite of Daravek’s shoulder guards. His claws found better purchase, tearing mangled shreds of armour plating free and ripping through the meat beneath, yet each savage wound sealed almost as soon as it was carved. Prey is blessed. Gifts from the Undying God. Gifts from the Shifting Many. Cannot kill alone.

  I couldn’t rise. I couldn’t shoot. The arm I raised did not end in a double-barrelled bolter clutched in an armoured fist; it ended raggedly at the elbow, severed moments before by one of the other bodyguards’ blades.

  ‘Khayon.’ Daravek spat my name from his bleeding mouth, advancing on me, step by slow step. ‘I. See. You.’

  The daemon’s snarls turned frantically feline as Daravek gripped Nagual’s biting face over his shoulder and began to sink his fingers into his skull.

  Master!

  I tore myself free of the useless husk that had been Tychondrian, suffering the disembodied vulnerability of an unseen etheric form. My body, my true body, was kilometres from here – hunched and chanting and utterly useless. In the air around me, I felt the shivery threat of shapeless daemons drawn to my unbound spirit, hungering for the taste of a human soul. No time for caution.

  I closed myself around Daravek, seeping through the cracks in his armour, sinking into the pores of his skin, driving into the meat of his mind. Possession is among the most desperate and difficult ways to attack a soul. It rarely works without intensive preparation, and he sensed me at once, as surely as if I held a blade to his throat. Immersion within a soul comes with a horrific sharing of overlapping senses as the brain plays host to two souls, awakening the mind with painful hisses of meshed memories and sending burning stabs of sensory input along overburdened optic nerves.

  Not this time. Daravek’s spirit was iron. Trying to puppet his flesh was to shout into a storm; I was hopelessly overwhelmed against his strength. He repelled me from his flesh through force of will, and hurled the daemon-cat away through force of muscle.

  He was bloodied and battered, cut off from the survivors of his warband, his fortress falling around him – yet he still lived. He turned, paying no heed to the blood he vomited down his chest-plate, disgorging internal filth through the grate of his teeth and seeking me, wild-eyed and raving.

  No. Not seeking me. Seeking my ally, the traitor now revealed in his midst.

  ‘Ilyaster.’

  One of his inner circle still lived. Ilyaster, that patient and parched creature serving as Daravek’s herald, standing as ever with his liege lord’s scythe of office in his hands. He too was wounded from the fray, his Cataphractii plate mauled and spitting sparks from its bac
k-mounted power generator. I had not touched him, nor had my daemon familiar.

  Ilyaster pulled the ceremonial weapon from the corpse of the brother warrior he had just beheaded, and raised it to ward off his own lord.

  ‘You.’ Daravek’s mouth ran with black blood as he regurgitated the accusation. ‘You betrayed me. You summoned Abaddon’s mongrel. You!’

  The shadow-lynx advanced from one side, Ilyaster from the other, wounded but determined.

  Now. It had to be now. Daravek could destroy all three of us if he was allowed to retake control of the battle.

  But I had nothing left. I hurled myself into him once more. He repelled me without effort, as defiantly as though his soul were warded by steel.

  Weakening by the moment, I drove back into his mind, thinning myself into near-nothingness, offering no solid presence for him to repel a third time. I did not need to master his flesh, merely steal a moment of opportunity.

  No assault this time. This was attunement, a harmonising with his body’s mortal processes. I flowed through his physical form, riding his blood, feeling the singing sting of adrenaline and electrical impulses from his nervous system.

  Pain.

  I willed pulses of flame to dance along the cobweb of his nerves, forcing his muscles to contract, to clench, to spasm.

  It was enough. Enough to loosen his grip on the axe, enough to paralyse Daravek the span of a single breath.

  The daemon-beast was a hammer weight of taloned shadow against my face and chest. The ceremonial scythe was a lance blow cracking into my side. I felt myself falling to the ground, weighed down by the body I had suffused with suffering.

  Feed! The daemon’s snarls came with each jarring, reaving blow of his clawed paws. Feed! Blood! Meat! Life!

  I was Daravek in that moment. Every word was a thunder crack against my shattering skull. The daemon, the minion of Abaddon’s mongrel assassin, was taking me to pieces. I could not move. My armour was shattered by my own ceremonial scythe in Ilyaster’s hands.