Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Bolters crashing in arrhythmic percussion. Energised blades thunder-clapping against burning war-plate. Blood running hot, steaming in the cold, marshy air. Life becoming vapour, red smoke curling from riven ceramite.

  ‘There is little to say.’

  ‘And yet,’ said Telemachon, ‘so many of our cousins among the Legions do have something to say, and they all say the same thing.’

  Iskandar Khayon died at Drol Kheir.

  ‘It was a battle,’ I replied. ‘A vast one, but not a glorious one.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Why does this matter?’ His fascination was unjustified. Several warbands from various Legions had banded together against several others and waged war across the ever-shifting ground of a daemon world, warring for territory. What else was there to say? Battles of that kind took place every hour of every day somewhere within Eyespace. Drol Kheir was unremarkable beyond the immense casualties sustained, when the Death Guard had rained alchemical toxins upon their allies and enemies alike.

  ‘But,’ Telemachon pressed, ‘whose side were you on?’

  I was scarcely listening to his irrelevant purring. Something on his armour drew my eye.

  ‘Hold,’ I commanded. He turned back to me, his impassive, beautiful silver faceplate meeting my gaze and targeting locks.

  I tore Telemachon’s sidearm free of its leather holster, pulling it into my hand with a drag of telekinesis. I turned the ornate bolt pistol in my fist, looking at the curious decoration hanging from the polished gold grip. Tokens and charms were common on our weapons and armour, but I’d never seen him with this keepsake before.

  A feather. A single black feather. I tore it from the fine golden chain that bound it to the pistol grip and crushed it in my hand.

  ‘Is this from her wings?’ I demanded.

  ‘But of course.’

  ‘You diseased creature. Stalking her. Watching her.’

  ‘And more.’ The onyx of his eyes flashed with reflected light. Telemachon was smiling. His facemask didn’t change, but I sensed whatever was left of his face behind the silver twisting in mirth.

  I ground the remnants of the feather beneath my boot. In the same moment, Nagual ghosted silently from the shadows behind Tele­machon, his muscles bunching with the urge to leap.

  No, I sent to my lynx.

  I will end him. My mind inferred the tigrus-lynx’s violent eagerness as words, though as ever no words were spoken. His jaws parted slowly, readying volcanic-glass sabre-teeth the length of swords.

  No, Nagual.

  His thoughts curdled, becoming a fusion of expectant sensation: the rending of ceramite beneath unbreakable claws, the hot rush of human blood upon the tongue…

  Nagual. I sent the command as a blade to break through the beast’s closing mind. Obey.

  He heeded me, but only just. Only because he had to, lest he risk my displeasure.

  I missed my wolf, lost to Horus Reborn all those years before. Where Nagual had hunger, Gyre had possessed intelligence; where Gyre was a gifted huntress, Nagual was a ravening destroyer. He had his uses, but I was increasingly certain that I would banish him soon, just as I’d banished every other failed successor to the wolf I still mourned.

  All of this transpired in the merest of moments. I looked from my lynx to Telemachon, and the words I spoke were not the ones I had intended to speak.

  ‘Do you value your life so little?’ I asked him, surprising myself with my own honesty. ‘This hunger for her will be the death of you.’

  The swordsman tilted his head, regarding me through his backlit eye-lenses. ‘Is that concern I hear in your voice, Lekzahndru? Can it be that you fear for my well-being?’

  Loyalty to Ezekyle’s vision had so far prevented our mutual distrust from becoming disgust. We had sworn to be brothers and never to harm one another, an oath taken at Abaddon’s behest when we first carved the Legion symbols from our armour. Telemachon had stolen several artificer slaves to artfully paint his armour black. I had simply charred the paint from my own and blackened it with conjured wisps of warpfire.

  We were far from our lord now, but my adherence to his vision was inviolate. I believed in Abaddon’s ambitions; I would not break with his trust. I tossed the pistol back to Telemachon.

  ‘The same rules that govern you and me do not apply to Nefertari,’ I pointed out. ‘If you continue to antagonise her, she will kill you regardless of our oath.’

  ‘And you fear bearing the blame for her actions?’ Damn him, I could hear the smile in his voice. ‘Ah, no, it isn’t that. What you fear is far more territorial. It makes your skin crawl, doesn’t it? The chance she may come to treasure my attentions. You fear that the Youngest God looks through my eyes, seeking to swallow her soul.’

  I stared at him, at the argent and flawless face he presented to brother and foe alike. Words eluded me for several seconds. How was one supposed to react to such baiting?

  ‘Spare me the deluded twists of your broken mind,’ I said. ‘I do not interfere with the preening, wailing things you call minions. Do not meddle with my coterie, either.’

  ‘As you wish, Lekzahndru,’ he replied smoothly. He reached to run his fingers through Nagual’s striped grey-black fur, but the daemon gave a throaty warning snarl. Telemachon pulled his hand back. ‘I see,’ the swordsman said, perfectly calm. I could feel him smiling again.

  Amurael was watching us, as were his warriors. The servos in Amurael’s neck snarled as he shook his head.

  ‘If you’re finished, brothers?’

  Chastened, I fell in behind him once more. Greasy amusement still radiated from Telemachon’s aura. I felt it as an itch against my skin, impossible to ignore.

  Part of my irritation was that he’d spoken the plain truth. If he baited Nefertari into crossing blades with him, the blame would fall on my shoulders for not controlling her. Abaddon tolerated her only because I had made it clear I wouldn’t cast her aside. She was too useful to me.

  I wouldn’t let myself consider Telemachon’s other insinuations. His sick craving for her was born of his hunger for sensation, any sensation at all, and the god that flowed in his bloodstream cried out to devour Nefertari’s eldar soul. Being near to her caused him pain. Even the slow creep of agony she caused him electrified his nerves with pleasure.

  Wretched parasite, I thought.

  Master? My simple-minded familiar’s senses met mine.

  Not you, Nagual.

  The Faceless Man?

  How many times had I imprinted Telemachon’s name upon what passed for Nagual’s mind? Each attempt was an exercise in futility.

  Yes. The Faceless Man.

  The Faceless Man. How apt. To his own men, the warriors of the Shrieking Masquerade, Telemachon was most often called the Masqued Prince. I preferred Nagual’s title.

  I will end him, the great cat promised me. Flicker-flash sensations hissed through my thoughts – the salty heat of running blood, the useless thrashing of prey with my jaws locked around its throat…

  No, Nagual.

  Breathe the command and it will be done.

  As tempting as it was, I did nothing of the kind.

  The first chamber of worth we reached was among the more tragic sights I have ever witnessed. Deep within the complex, Amurael led us into an apothecarion that far exceeded any military medicae centre in both grandeur and purpose. Colossal vault-tanks rose like fortress walls, all instrumentation and console circuitry pulled apart and riven by chainblades. The archive banks, where priceless genetic material had been held in stasis-locked storage, were looted and destroyed in deliberate spite rather than by the incidental damage of war. Every container that had once held vital chemical cocktails of preservative fluids was smashed and dry, now home to hives of insect vermin making their lairs in machines that had once granted transhuman life.

  A ge
ne-seed repository. I recognised the place’s purpose as soon as I saw it. The importance of these hallowed halls is burned into the very marrow of every Legion warrior.

  Telemachon similarly needed no elucidation. He laughed softly upon entering, the sound slow and wet and entirely sincere at the devastation of this priceless place.

  Amurael had been Medicae Quintus within the Sons of Horus – a ranking officer by any judgement. He walked through the chamber as if in the grip of a dream, no doubt seeing the shades of what had once been overlaying the truth of what was. He examined shattered machinery and useless tools, saying nothing as he explored.

  ‘Was this your laboratory?’ I asked him.

  ‘No. Mine was always aboard the Viridian Sky. The warriors of my company never risked storing our gene-seed reserves on Maeleum, even before the Emperor’s Children came for the Warmaster’s corpse.’

  Something occurred to me then that hadn’t before. When the Children of the Emperor raided this world and defiled Horus’ corpse for use in their bastardised cloning foundries, they surely wouldn’t have resisted plundering the XVI Legion’s gene-seed depositories.

  Twice the insult. Twice the desecration.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ Amurael declared. ‘Let’s go.’

  Nagual was busy, breathing corrosive smoke into a colony of slug-like creatures that crackled and popped as they dissolved. He licked the resulting sludge up with one swipe of his tongue, swallowing noisily.

  To me, I sent.

  The lynx obeyed, his eyes glowing with the absorption of more daemonic matter. We walked on though the rusted dark. And to think I had been concerned about playing ambassador on Maeleum. We were not emissaries. We were practically thieves.

  Thieves in a realm where everything of worth had already been stolen.

  A journey that should have taken us no time at all instead took over a week, in the time-lost way one judges such things in the Eye. So many of the tunnels had mutated closed or fallen into ruin, we found ourselves constantly doubling back and seeking alternate routes. Added to that, the labyrinthine complexes beneath the earth shifted when you dared take your eyes from the passage ahead, leading in conflicting directions again and again. Truly the warp had riddled its way through the stone of this world’s core and twisted the planet to its indiscernible whims.

  And all the while, Khayon, Khayon echoed in my skull. Never louder, never quieter, never weaker, never stronger. Just… there.

  Our armour sustained us, feeding nutrients back into our systems and infusing us with synthesised chemical feeds to maintain alertness and health over protracted deployment. The leathery flesh of the dead – even their bones – would offer us sustenance if we chose to indulge, but we were a far cry from starvation. Telemachon sampled those cold delicacies purely out of choice. I made no comment each time I saw him removing the lower half of his faceplate to do so; eating the unburied dead was something most of us had done in times of desperation, and there was no denying that necessity had become preference among many warbands banished to the Eye. By Imperial standards, such feasts are the least of our sins.

  I learned that the entirety of Maeleum was connected beneath the surface, with freeholds and subterranean fortresses linked by tunnels and trenches. The deeper we moved, the more evidence pointed to abandonment rather than annihilation. Signs of conflict lessened, replaced by signs of desolation. The bodies we found had expired from hunger or thirst as often as those torn open by raiders’ weapons. The Emperor’s Children hadn’t penetrated to the deepest levels in huge numbers. When they had passed this far, it was as slavers and plunderers, eager to get their spoils back to the surface. Thus, they had sacrificed an invader’s thoroughness for a pirate’s prudence. Even some of the armouries weren’t looted fully, though the weapons we found there were in various states of dysfunction.

  One of the wonders we discovered in the depths was a great transit route – powered down and empty now – with an underground conveyor rail tunnel between one fortress and another. The mutants that thrived down there in the lightless deeps prayed to the powerless rail-engines as iron gods, beseeching them to awaken from their slumber. I could not guess how many generations of Legion slaves and serfs had interbred under the Eye’s influence to produce these sorry creatures.

  I pitied them, though more for their uselessness and ignorance than from any sympathy. Amurael and the others ignored them. Telemachon found them delightful, hunting them the way a beast would hunt herds of weaker prey. He laughed joyously as he raced away into the darkness, returning later with blood spatters drying across his armour.

  Nagual ached to give chase to them as well. I allowed it each time, if only to distract my lynx from pulsing his hungry insistence that he would kill Telemachon if I but asked. I wondered if Nefertari, alone on the surface all this time, had found similar prey.

  Amurael focused only on the gene-seed depositories. He didn’t hold much hope of locating actual genetic material, knowing that all of it would have been destroyed or long since rotted within failed preservative machinery. Instead, he sought to rekindle what systems he could bring back to a semblance of life, seeking data above all. He worked with his customary focus, draining wounded data-archives of any lore they could be coaxed into surrendering.

  I was tempted to ask if he was delaying our journey, taking these alternate routes to rifle through old apothecarions.

  Khayon, the voice caressed the inside of my skull, a constant whisper against the back of my eyes. Khayon. Khayon. Khayon.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I snapped at Amurael at one point.

  ‘Compiling a monograph,’ he said, as he watched an information feed inloading into his narthecium’s storage coils. ‘A treatise on every aspect of the Legion’s gene-seed. This is a rare opportunity. I want every word ever written about the process, from basic schema and flawed experimentation all the way through to stable modification.’

  ‘We can already maintain what we have,’ said Telemachon.

  ‘Barely,’ Amurael replied without looking up from his vambrace console.

  ‘Our numbers won’t fall if we’re diligent.’

  Amurael still didn’t look up. ‘They will over time whether we’re diligent or not. But this isn’t only about the gene-seed supplies we already have.’

  ‘Names,’ I said, interrupting their burgeoning disagreement. ‘Ezekyle is not only gathering gene-seed data, he is gathering names. The name of every Son of Horus entered into the Legion’s archives as confirmed dead.’

  This was typical of Abaddon’s precision. He was compiling an archive of who still lived, tallying the fallen and survivors alike. It was the best way of knowing what percentage of the remaining Legion was already sworn to us, sailing as part of our fleet. The rest would be hunted down, and recruited or killed.

  Amurael’s nod told me that I had assumed correctly.

  ‘I was made for greater deeds than administrative archiving,’ said Telemachon. ‘Be swift. This place bores me.’

  It took another two days to reach the Tomb of Horus.

  The sarcophagus was empty. Where once Horus had lain in state – arms crossed over his chest, hands gripping the hilt of Worldbreaker – there now stood a great coffin of empty cracked marble. Its proportions were appropriately massive, only making its emptiness more pitiable. The gold leaf inscriptions were gone, broken by boots and hammers. Towering windows of stained glass, once backlit in this subterranean sanctuary, were holes in the high walls, while the scenes of glory and rebellion they had once depicted were reduced to diamond rubble that crunched beneath our boots. Skulls that had once been the trophies of innumerable conquests were particulate bone dust, swirling slowly in the stagnant air.

  Amurael’s men were commanded to wait. We went in alone.

  Khayon, the whisper brushed against me once more. Still sourceless, still directionless.

  O
nce this fortress had been called the Monumentum Primus. Now it was a ruined castle deep within Maeleum’s crust, shaped from slave-hewn rock and the eroding bones of monstrous warp serpents.

  I have been in places that stank of tawdry, useless prayer, and I have walked worlds where I was the only living being, yet no fane or cathedral ever felt so crass as that crypt, and no prison or place of lonely pilgrimage ever felt as desolate.

  I was not sure whom I despised more – those that had prayed here as fools kneel before an altar, or those that had defiled this tomb out of blasphemous ambition.

  The crypt was lifeless but far from empty. Wraiths gathered here in worship, ethereal and near silent. Here were the shades of kneeling beastmen, their avian crying and bestial braying stolen by time, rendered down to breathy impressions of the sounds once made by living throats. Here were warriors in the viridian battleplate of the Sons of Horus, standing in austere reflection or duelling over their father’s bones. Here were invading Emperor’s Children, laughing, killing, executing.

  Hordes of fighting warriors. Hosts of worshippers. Moments in time overlapping, conjured by the spiritual significance of this hallowed ground.

  ‘Iskandar,’ Amurael said, low and solemn. ‘If you would.’

  I nodded. With a gesture of my hand I banished the unquiet dead, pushing the manifest energy from this vast chamber. It was like scattering a handful of sand to the wind. Devoid of those echoes,­ the chamber grew truly silent. Alone now, we approached the sarcophagus.

  The body this coffin had cradled was years gone, first hauled away like a hunter’s kill to be dissected on the unclean slabs of III Legion butcher-surgeons, then recovered by Abaddon and the very first of his Ezekarion after the destruction of Horus Reborn. What remained of the Warmaster’s corpse – the genetic plunder that was all Fabius Bile had left intact from the looted cadaver – was housed safely within the Apothecarion Apex aboard the Vengeful Spirit, stasis-sealed and guarded by a hundred of our Syntagma war robots, linked to the Anamnesis’ conscious control.