Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Telemachon’s aura flared with the caress of rich, snide delight. He was the one that stepped forwards, his hands on his sheathed swords.

  ‘I hear your words, my dear brother, and like you, I am of the Ezekarion. As Subcommander Vorolas’ commanding officer, I accept the challenge in his place.’

  Lheor spat again. He wiped his mouth with the back of his gauntlet. ‘I challenged your pet, Lyras, not you.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Telemachon turned fractionally to Zaidu, and their two helms bent together in melodramatic affirmation. ‘Do you see the axe on the deck, Subcommander Vorolas?’

  Zaidu’s reply came as a reassuring hiss. ‘I do, Lord Lyras.’ The theatrical innocence in his vile voice was beyond grating.

  ‘Then I accept the challenge on Subcommander Vorolas’ behalf,’ Telemachon restated. ‘Such is my right, as his lord.’

  To his credit – or rather, in an unsurprising sign of his own zealotry – Lheor did not hesitate. He drew the saw-toothed flensing knife at his hip and stepped forwards, facing our warband’s finest warrior with a naked grin.

  ‘Is that what you want? I care not whose blood runs for this, Lyras. Yours or that screaming dog’s – it’s all the same to me.’

  In the years to come, I would often think back to this moment. The sight of Lheor advancing on Telemachon, our warband’s finest bladesman, carrying nothing but a skinning knife in his hand. Lheor is long dead now, fallen on Mackan, as I have said before. But this is the man I remember, the grinning and confident warrior that faced the perfect swordsman, carrying only a dagger.

  Ezekyle? I sent to my lord. Do something before this madness gets further out of hand.

  Abaddon watched and said nothing. He looked weary beyond reckoning, but his eyes met mine and he nodded, finally giving me the signal I needed. I drew Sacramentum, and she flashed sacred silver in the strategium’s sick light.

  ‘Enough.’ My command was both spoken and driven into the minds of everyone present. The beastmen whined and lowered their heads in submission. The warriors regarded me with a mixture of reluctant obedience and resentment that I had stepped forwards to break the promise of bloodsport.

  Telemachon did not look at me. ‘You have no right interfering, Lekzahndru.’

  Lheor shared the sentiment. ‘You can have his pretty burial mask, Khayon, once I’ve carved it from his skull.’

  I cut the air between them with Sacramentum’s shining length. ‘You,’ I addressed Telemachon, ‘are duelling no one on anyone’s behalf. You think me blind to this transparent ploy? And you,’ I aimed my blade at Zaidu, ‘may expect my summons later. If you refuse to speak the truth in this matter, Zaidu Vorolas, I will tear it from your mind.’

  I looked between Zaidu and Lheor. ‘Now both of you, back down.’

  Zaidu obeyed at once, moving away with Telemachon, but Lheor did not. Spittle gleamed on his chin, and he watched their retreating forms with bloodshot eyes, still gunning his chainaxe.

  ‘Coward.’ He drooled the word with a stalactite of saliva, then shouted it louder, setting off another chorus of cheers. I pulled Lheor aside, dragging him by the pauldron.

  You foolish bastard.

  He winced at the silent knife of my voice, cursing me and snapping back, ‘Get out of my head.’

  ‘You foolish bastard,’ I said aloud the second time.

  Above us, Ultio drifted in her tank, her nude form a silhouette in the amniotic fluid of her artificial womb. Several of the Syntagma stood nearby – the war robots and cognitively enslaved cyborgs she commanded were bristling with weaponry. The human and mutant crew knew to stay clear of her mechanical enforcers. To the beastmen clans that served us, the Syntagma were machine angels that obeyed the ship’s soul.

  Lheor bared his iron teeth, his features twitching. A particularly painful spasm forced one of his eyes to screw closed and his mouth to pull to the side for two heartbeats.

  ‘You’re lecturing me, you uptight cur? The Shrieking Masquerade caused more casualties among my warriors than that Gods-cursed Daravek you failed to kill. Zaidu is lucky I brought my grievance before Abaddon instead of killing him back on the Thylakus battlefield.’

  Luck had nothing to do with it. One of the ways Abaddon promoted unity was by overseeing disputes and duels between chieftains and warlords himself, rather than letting them slaughter each other out of his sight, according to their own whims. A subtle touch, but one of the many ways in which he sought to impose laws over our chaotic way of life. If nothing else, I admired his monarchical intentions.

  ‘Zaidu is baiting you,’ I said to Lheor. ‘I cannot imagine that you do not see that.’

  ‘I see it.’ Lheor sucked his saliva back through his teeth. ‘I’m not blind. That Nostraman wretch, I’ll pull his hearts from his chest and–’

  ‘And if that challenge had been allowed?’ I interrupted. ‘Tele­machon will fight in Zaidu’s place. If Ezekyle had not ordered me to act, brother, you would be locking blades with the Masqued Prince this very moment instead of receiving a lecture from me.’

  ‘I’d rather have the duel.’ Lheor’s left eye screwed shut as his cheek gave another wrenching spasm. Anger still rippled from him in an unpleasant breath against my sixth sense, but it was lessening now, a tide on its way out. ‘The Masqued Prince,’ Lheor said in a growl. ‘Ha! I’d cut him to pieces.’

  I stared at him for several seconds, amazed, truly amazed, that he honestly believed what he was saying.

  Deluded or not – and he most certainly was if he thought he could outfight Telemachon – Lheor was calming down. That was good. That was all I needed for now. I turned back to seek Moriana, only to see her slipping free of my Rubricae, moving forwards, a dark serenity spreading through the crowd around her.

  This lone, unaugmented human strode towards Abaddon, strode past mutants and monsters and warriors, and we watched her as if enspelled. Surprise was writ plain across many of my brothers’ faces. Even the mutants and braying beastmen, who had been so eagerly praying for bloodshed to erupt between their masters – for there was no finer entertainment than seeing their betters bleed – fell silent.

  Moriana walked to the base of Abaddon’s dais, and there she stood as tall and regal as a human could amidst a horde of monsters and mutants and gene-forged warriors, the least of which still towered above her.

  ‘Ezekyle Abaddon,’ she said, her gaze lifted to his. ‘May we speak?’

  He stared at her, and I will never forget how he showed no surprise at her manifestation. I do not know if he knew her from before our exile to the Eye, nor if he had been expecting her, but I do know that there was no surprise in his eyes when she stood before him. Perhaps he was merely too drained to react, but I do not believe so. There was something else at work that day, perhaps the fate that our seers and prophets prattle of at such length.

  ‘Speak,’ Abaddon bade her with a ripple of the Talon.

  Moriana spoke. She told my gathered brothers and sisters what she had already told me, Amurael and Telemachon on the graveyard world of the XVI Legion.

  Back on Maeleum, she had claimed to be a seer. More than that, she swore she had foreseen our arrival within Horus’ tomb.

  Moriana had been on Maeleum for some time, drawn by its spiritual resonance and its place at the crossroads of fate. She claimed to know nothing of the downed Black Templars vessel, and her aura flickered with truth when she made that claim. She likewise knew little of those black-clad warriors herself, deflecting our irritation by insisting she had far worthier tales to tell.

  We let her speak. As she did so, she led us from the crypt, back to the wreckage-strewn surface and onwards into the wilderness of the eternal rust yards. All the while she spoke of how her dreams had driven her into the Eye itself and then to Maeleum.

  ‘I bring a warning to Abaddon of a rival to his throne by the name of Thagus Daravek. More than tha
t, I bring word of the Imperium as it is, not the empire that you once knew.’

  The possibility of deceit was foremost in our minds, yet how could we resist such lore? She answered our questions, some clearly, some with evasions.

  The Imperium she spoke of was a realm unreal to us. In the centuries since we brought fire to the sky above the Imperial Palace, our names and deeds were not just consigned ever deeper into history, they were increasingly woven into mythology.

  Knowledge of the rebellion – a conflict she called ‘the Horus ­Heresy’, the first time I ever heard those words spoken – was ever more guarded and sequestered. Imperial authorities twisted what had happened in the war when they acknowledged it at all, and it was far more common to suppress any facts through sanction and even execution. Worlds deemed too tainted by the truth were declared forbidden ground, blockaded from trade and transit, struck from astrocartographic charts and severed from astropathic communion until generations had passed. Some were even cleansed of life and resettled by harvests of colonists and itinerant pilgrim populations.

  Hope and ambition were no longer the currencies of mankind. In an age of spreading peace, the truth was becoming myth. The people of humanity’s empire turned their devotion to soulful adherence in prayer and duty, while the Imperium’s armies forgot how they had once warred upon each other and instead turned their weapons outwards, to the xenos races that had retaken their territories after the failed Great Crusade had dissolved in civil war.

  I listened in absolute awe. Nothing in the mists of her aura suggested any deception. If anything, she seemed to be taking care with her words, for fear of overwhelming us or provoking incredulity. I wished for nothing more than to tear her mind apart, ransacking her memories for all she had seen and all she had felt within this new Imperium. The only thing that stopped me was simple caution – she was adamant that she must meet with Abaddon, and I knew my lord would need to meet this outlander for himself.

  Moriana spoke on. Whole worlds had been reshaped, their continents given over to graveyards and necropolises, mourning not the slain on either side of our nearly forgotten war but the more recent dead of the last several hundred years: the innocent martyrs of the God-Emperor’s faithful flock.

  The God-Emperor.

  The God-Emperor.

  Language cannot convey the effect those words had on me. I will do all I can to explain it, knowing that every explanation is wrong, for no wordcraft can truly shape an impression of what I felt the first time I heard that title.

  ‘The God-Emperor,’ Moriana said again, when Amurael asked her to repeat herself. He had stopped as if struck, his thoughts running so acidly rancid that I felt them pressing against my senses.

  Telemachon had been exultant, roaring his laughter to the sky, so gripped by euphoric revelation that I thought his twin hearts might seize. If you have ever walked an asylum’s halls, you know that laughter. It is something beyond mirth, beyond elation. It is a release, a dam that breaks in the back of the mind to let madness pour forth, preventing the brain from drowning in poison.

  The God-Emperor. I tried to repeat Moriana’s words but my mouth refused to give them shape. I was laughing myself.

  Telemachon could barely breathe. The laughter sawed in and out of his faceplate’s vocaliser, wheezing and wet, hacking as if he’d ruptured something in his throat. Amurael stood dumb, trying to process what he had heard. Trying and failing.

  Yet Moriana was far from finished. She spoke on, telling us of the Cult of the Emperor Saviour emerging from the disorder of the rebellion’s aftermath. Uprisings of this cult were commonplace on countless worlds, subsuming whole systems in this tide of new belief. The Emperor, revered as the source of the Astronomican, allowed travel between humanity’s scattered worlds. The Emperor, Master of Mankind, Bane of Aliens, the one true deity.

  A god.

  They believed the Emperor was a god.

  I knew how and why this had happened, even before she said another word. It happened as it always happens, as any scholar of their own species’ history can tell you: it happened because the helpless masses were fearful, and because the powerful wanted unchallenged control. Every religion rises for the same reasons – the lower tiers of a society crave answers and comfort, needing rewards in an afterlife to justify the harshness and grimness of their lives. And to prevent uprisings in search of better existences, their rulers institute a creed that keeps the masses obedient and compliant.

  Meekness, obedience, submission… These become virtues that the oppressed must embody in pursuit of a greater good or a later reward.

  To stand against the prevailing belief becomes not just philosophy but heresy. Heresy worthy of execution. And so control is maintained by the strong over the weak.

  ‘The God-Emperor,’ I finally managed to say. There have been many times in my life since then that I have cursed that title or cringed at hearing it cried by His deluded followers. But that day, damn me for my naïvety, I was laughing with Telemachon. A cruel, spurned mirth, not the amusement of the victor but the bleak joy of the beaten. That laughter was a purging, like shedding an uncomfortable sheath of skin.

  ‘Much of the Imperium already adheres to the word of the sect as gospel,’ Moriana continued. ‘The Temple of the Emperor Saviour has a far wider reach and deeper roots than the petty cults that flowered during your rebellion. The Lectitio Divinitatus was a child’s bedtime candle compared to the sunlight of the beliefs now gripping the Imperium.’

  All these thousands of years later, deep in what scholars name the Dark Millennium, the Ecclesiarchy grips the whole Imperium in an inviolate hold. Moriana spoke of its rise as an inexorable ascension, only a handful of centuries before its formal, final adoption as the Imperial Creed, backbone of the Adeptus Ministorum, state religion of the Imperium of Man.

  And all of it, all of it, founded from the very beliefs that the Emperor had sought to destroy.

  Just as the Emperor had been betrayed by His sons, so too had the fool been betrayed by His own empire. Blind and rudderless without its monarch to guide it, the Imperium was devolving into superstitions and half-truths. No wonder we were already close to being myths.

  ‘The Word Bearers won.’ Telemachon was on his hands and knees in the dust, blood trickling from his unmoving silver mouth. He laughed and heaved and vomited and laughed, speaking between dragged breaths and violent convulsions. ‘The Word Bearers won. They eat dirt and drink shame. They chant prayers to the unwanted truth through bloodied lips. They lost everything. And yet they still won.’

  ‘I did not fight for the Word Bearers’ vision,’ Amurael snapped. ‘None of us did. Our ideals were higher and worthier than the pedantics of divinity.’

  He looked at me as if expecting my support. I could not give it. What ideals could I claim, truly? I had fought in the rebellion because there was no choice. The Wolves razed Prospero and stole the choice from us. I waged war upon Terra because my side was chosen for me.

  ‘What of you?’ I asked Moriana. ‘You are older than your physical form. Your soul is far older than your flesh. You have lived for centuries within this new Imperium, have you not? What, then, of your beliefs?’

  She stared at me, measuring me by some silent criteria. I could tell from the flaring corona of her aura that my words had surprised her. I felt her thoughts shifting, following this new path.

  ‘I believed the same,’ she admitted. ‘For many years I believed Him to be a god. I was instrumental in spreading the belief myself.’

  Images, memories, swirled slowly behind her eyes. Before they could resolve, she somehow felt me looking within her skull. A wall of mist swarmed across my sixth sense. I had met no other mortal who could defend themselves with such swiftness and ease, but I’d seen enough to confirm my suspicions.

  ‘You still believe it.’

  ‘I know what I know,’ she said. Her voice turned mela
ncholy but ironclad in the same moment, all doubt gone. ‘A god or not, His power renders Him indistinguishable from divinity.’

  ‘This is not the kind of theosophic discussion our liege lord enjoys,’ I warned her.

  ‘No? And yet you’ll take me to Abaddon whether you wish it or not, because you know he would never forgive you for leaving me here. There is more that I cannot say now. So much of what I know is only for Abaddon to hear.’

  ‘For his ears alone?’

  ‘For his ears first.’

  ‘You expect us to allow that?’

  She endured my doubt with a priestess’ patience. ‘You’ll have to accept it, Khayon. Not only here and now, but in the many years to come.’

  There was no unkindness in those words, yet they made my skin crawl. Telemachon was still coughing and chuckling. ‘Perfect,’ he was saying. ‘Perfection itself.’

  I had to help him to his feet. ‘Medic,’ he called out mockingly to Amurael as I lifted him to stand.

  ‘I fail to see what’s so amusing in all this,’ said Amurael.

  ‘The perfect jest,’ Telemachon replied, a grin in his honeyed voice. ‘Don’t you see? We are all part of the perfect jest.’

  All of this, she told Abaddon and those of us gathered on the command deck. Telemachon was speaking softly among a group of his Shrieking Masquerade warriors. Lheor was calm, stunned to silence. Amurael looked disgusted. None of us moved, none but Ultio, who turned in her amniotic sanctuary, looking down across the crowd at one warrior in particular.

  ‘Ezekyle?’ she asked. Her voice was a murmur from the mouths of a hundred brass gargoyles in the rafters. The Vengeful Spirit itself, prow to stern, shuddered in sympathy with her concern. She was a weapon, a beast of war, and she feared for the soul of her master.

  Abaddon watched Moriana, his eyes glassy, mouth parted to show a glint of his filed, rune-etched teeth. He inclined his head, a reassurance for the ship’s machine-spirit and a bid for Moriana to continue.