Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  When the Promise of Absolution died, his face twitched as if in pain, though I knew it was far more likely hunger.

  ‘Was that the Absolution?’ His voice was a raised snarl. I could feel the need within him, the feverish desire to adopt what he and his brethren called ‘the warshape’, letting the daemon threaded through his flesh ascend to the fore in the hour of bloodshed. He fought the instinct, just as he fought the bite of the Butcher’s Nails in his brain.

  It was, I sent back, telepathy far more reliable than shouting amidst so many other voices. He twitched again, this time in true pain at his cranial implants reacting to the unwanted touch of my silent voice.

  ‘There were almost two thousand warriors on that ship,’ he said between clenched teeth. He didn’t mention the tens of thousands of slaves, serfs, thralls and servitors, but even noting the loss of our brethren was a sentiment I had never expected from Delvarus, of all men. He said more, but the Vengeful Spirit kicked around us as it pounded through another devastating wave, casting the deck into flickering darkness for several seconds and intensifying the warning sirens.

  Ultio screamed again, her voice razoring from the shouting mouths of a hundred gargoyles and fallen angels. The ship cried out with her, from its ram to its roaring engines, its superstructure groaning with torment.

  As that dual cry rang through our minds, I looked up to Ashur-Kai. He stood on his navigational platform above the bridge, eyes wide, long hair like a banner in the grip of a storm’s wind. He was braced as we were all braced, though he saw none of us. His sight was tuned to the realm outside the ship, and his hands on the twin control columns sent impulses and commands to Ultio and to the Vengeful Spirit itself. I’d never seen Ashur-Kai and the Anamnesis move in such perfect synchronicity, their motions mirrored, each lean and tilt and adjustment coming in the very same second for both sorcerer and living machine-spirit.

  Even their injuries were in symphony. The psy-stigmata that decorated Ultio’s flesh showed across Ashur-Kai’s face in the same constellations of ripping pain; three of those slashes torn open to the bone. Only when the ship crashed through the most forceful tides did they fall out of alignment, and Ashur-Kai’s pale features would strain with the effort of finding that slipped harmony once more. The Vengeful Spirit was Ultio’s ship; thanks to the Mechanicum’s ingenuity, she was far more aware and attuned to her vessel than most machine-spirits could ever be, but it was Ashur-Kai, her void-guide, who saw the way through the storm.

  If there was a way through this one.

  I… do not believe there is. Evidently he had heard my careless thoughts.

  The next ship to die was one of the nameless bulk cruisers that carried clans of beastmen warriors and warp-changed human slave soldiers. Its death lit the oculus as it veered wildly off course, rolling into the acidic tides either side of the turbulent channel we were carving, and a migraine crack of light flared sun-bright for half a heartbeat. A fraction of a moment later, it was gone. All that remained were the echoes of its captain’s screams over the vox-web.

  Three of Ultio’s vox-gargoyles toppled from the gothic rafters and shattered into marble rubble across the deck. Another, one of the bronze sculptures with its features twisted in ecstatic agony, crashed onto one of the crew consoles with the sound of a great bell tolling, killing two humans and crippling a third.

  I made my way to Abaddon, forced to move as a drunkard might across the shaking bridge and staggering over the corpses of the storm-slain. I gripped his shoulder guard, forcing him to face me. His face was his father’s face, red-lit by the emergency illumination, flashing with the colours of madness that danced outside the dying ship.

  We will not survive this, I sent directly into his mind. The Spirit cannot endure this punishment.

  ‘We must break through,’ he spat back through his filed teeth. ‘We will break through.’ And then, with the ever-surprising force of his own will, he spoke right into my mind. I will not die in this prison, Iskandar. I will be free. We will all be free. We will bring our fury to the Golden Throne itself, and the husk enshrined there will weep with the homecoming of His abandoned angels.

  I met his eyes for what felt like an eternity, though I know it cannot have been more than a brief moment. Blood of the Pantheon, but he looked like his father then. The creature before me was Horus in body and blood. The only difference was the eyes. Horus had been hollowed-through by the powers he had sought and failed to control; Abaddon was drained by forever resisting them. The father had been but a host for the strength of others. The son was a bastion of his own will and endurance. I saw then, truly and for the very first time, just what value my lord could be to the creatures we call Gods.

  What do you see, Iskandar?

  I snapped back to the reality of our flagship burning, shattering around us.

  What?

  Outside the ship. Do you see their hands at work?

  Abaddon knew none of my internal revelations. He wanted me to spread my senses beyond the warship’s hull. Were we being held here? Was this hurricane the whim of the malevolent consciousnesses that acted through the galactic wound we called the Eye?

  I cast my perceptions wide, breaking through the walls of the Vengeful Spirit, plunging into the firestorm of warp energy. I felt the cataclysm of forces at work, the shoving rage of our engines generating an equal pushback in the Eye’s resistant tides. I saw our armada drifting apart, unable to hold cohesion in the chaos. I saw daemons, a billion daemons, a trillion daemons riding and leaping and melting out of the warp-matter to burst – laughing, howling, clawing – against our warships’ hulls.

  ISKANDAR.

  I opened my eyes to my lord’s face once more. Sparks sprayed elsewhere across the command deck. I could smell burning fur and sizzling blood. Beastmen cawed and croaked and brayed and bellowed and died. So many of them were dying.

  ‘Stop the ship,’ I said, and though there was no hope of hearing me over the thunder, Abaddon read my lips.

  Is it them? he sent into my mind, fierce as a lance through the skull. I tensed and sought to back away from him, but he held me in place. The truth was that I did not know. Was this a move by the Gods in their Great Game? No one can know such things with certainty. But I know what I sensed outside the ship.

  It is us, I sent back. As we push, the storm pushes back. We push harder, it answers with thunder and acid and pain. Stop the ship. Stop the fleet.

  Abaddon released me and turned to the oculus once more. Fury, absolute in its intensity, blackened his features.

  ‘The fleet…’ Ultio began, and she needed to say no more. The oculus finished her thought, showing the shapes of our armada shrinking, falling behind, several more shaking beyond tolerance and beginning to shatter, others engulfed with wrapping shrouds of warp energy.

  The Vengeful Spirit gave its most savage heave yet, throwing half of the command crew to the deck. Several crew stations detonated through their links to suffering pressure points elsewhere aboard the ship.

  ‘The Blood Knight,’ Ultio called out, and her voice became a messy merging of warship names as they fell out of formation in grotesque and swift disorder. ‘The White Sigil, the Hammer of Sarthas, the Halo of Blades, the–’

  Abaddon screamed. It was a wordless cry of raw emotion, the roar of a thwarted king without the power to protect his crumbling kingdom. Rage laced that cry, as one would surely expect, but there was also frustration – frustration that others could not provide what he needed of them, and vexation that his plans were being swept aside by the hands of pathetic, accursed Gods at this latest of hours.

  ‘All stop!’

  Every warrior and crew member not actively engaged in keeping the ship held together turned to him. Ashur-Kai was down on one knee now, teeth bared into an invisible gale, his skin lacerated with a thousand cuts that wept tiny trickles of blood.

  ‘I… can get us through�
��’ he wheezed across the vox. His lungs sounded full of fluid, most likely blood. The warp was cutting him to pieces along with the ship.

  ‘All stop!’ Abaddon roared a second time.

  ‘Lord… I can…’

  Abaddon ignored him, his blazing gaze locked on the Anamnesis in her suspension tank. His voice was inaudible over the crashing, shaking bridge. All I saw was his mouth moving.

  ‘Ultio. Signal the fleet. All stop, all stop.’

  The protesting, failing ship was riven by new thunder as the engines banked and the retros bawled into life. The shaking, that heaving wrench of abused iron, slowly began to abate. I watched the oculus’ compound-eye view of the ships in our armada as they slowed in our wake. The ravaging warp tides eased around them.

  It took time to slow down, for our thrusters to bring everything into balance and for the warp’s angry tides to finally settle. A warship is never silent, nor even truly quiet. Plasma reactors kilometres away send their living murmurs through every inch of metal. Crew speak, curse, breathe, shift. Power armour hums as it idles and snarls when its wearers move. The Vengeful Spirit’s command deck was louder than most, with the size of its crew and the Anamnesis’ life-support tank with all its ticking, clicking ancillary cognition-machines.

  The fleet clustered around us, drawing in close the way a pack of beasts approaches its alpha with their throats showing in submission. Abaddon watched them drifting into formation, saying nothing. I could sense the swift cycle of his thoughts but could discern none of their meaning.

  ‘All stop,’ Ultio called after what felt like an age. I looked across the bridge, at the wounded and the dead, at the smoky aftermath of our failure. We had failed. We were trapped.

  Ashur-Kai descended from his platform, boots thudding on the gantry stairs, and knelt before Abaddon. He looked destroyed by his futile efforts, his eyes closed, blood scabbing across the host of psy-stigmata lacerations that covered his face and throat.

  ‘I tried, Ezekyle.’ Blood spattered to the deck by Abaddon’s boots, spilled from Ashur-Kai’s cut tongue. The warp had wounded him even there. ‘I tried.’

  There had been times before this – and there would be more to come – when Abaddon punished failure by execution. Sometimes, I must admit, these acts were delivered out of unrestrained anger, but more often as acts of calculated and precise mercilessness. To set examples. To establish boundaries. To spread fear, as all tyrants and warlords and kings have done, since time began and the first men and women ruled their brothers and sisters.

  But he is not without forgiveness. He knows when a defeat was ­unavoidable. That distant day, as our armada sat becalmed in the seas of madness, he barely even looked down at Ashur-Kai before resting a hand on the other warrior’s pauldron and lifting the sorcerer to his feet.

  ‘You cannot fight fate, brother. But you did well to try.’

  That choice of words rekindled life in the sorcerer’s red eyes. Shame, yes, but life as well – something dangerously close to hope. ‘Is that what you believe this was?’ he asked Abaddon. ‘Fate?’

  It was Moriana, an insignificant wraith at Abaddon’s side, who drew my eye. I felt my irritation rise with the way she stood in Abaddon’s shadow, where she alone seemed unbroken. Defeat settled across the rest of us like a cloak; Ashur-Kai and the Anamnesis were riven by warp-stigmata, and bodies of mutants lay across the bridge, yet she was the lone soul showing no unease at our continued imprison­ment. She looked almost vindicated, as if this outcome had been a suspicion of hers since we brought her aboard all those weeks before, and here it finally stood confirmed.

  ‘Greatness requires sacrifice.’ She looked between those of us gathered there, one by one, until her gaze finally settled on Ashur-Kai. ‘It always requires sacrifice. It is the way of all life. I tried to tell you this, Ezekyle.’

  He shrugged her off, evidently not as in thrall to her words as we had feared. She drew breath to press her point.

  ‘When the time comes, you cannot run from what must be done. Sacrifices must always be made.’

  ‘Be silent,’ I warned her. ‘Look around you, prophetess. See the fraying tempers and defeated hearts of those nearby. Now is not the time to weave smug and mystical allusions to the preciousness of hindsight.’

  Telemachon laughed softly behind his mask, though more in derision at my annoyance than agreement with it. Lheor gave Moriana a disgusted glance before jerking his chin towards Abaddon.

  ‘So now what?’ he asked.

  The question hung in the air between us. No one had an answer.

  In the long-ago Age of Sail, when vessels of wood and cloth rode the oceans of Terra at the mercy of weather and wind, there were fewer fates worse than being becalmed. Vessels without the breath of wind in their sails were doomed to drift in the ocean, too far from land for oars to be any salvation. That is the situation we found ourselves in. We were becalmed. To go forwards was to die, while to go back was to abandon all hope of a future. If we could not revenge ourselves upon the Imperium, why then did we band together in this new brotherhood? Why did we still draw breath?

  Perhaps you think us stubborn. Perhaps you believe we should have turned away and sailed back from whence we came, back to those daemon-world fortresses and those savage blood-raids against our brethren. Perhaps it truly seems that simple to you. But then, it would. You have never been free. Freedom, once tasted, cannot be so easily forgotten. Life in the Eye was an existence of hellish, endless battle in the underworld. It has always been our prison and our crucible as much as our sanctuary.

  Yet there we sat, motionless in the warp-touched void. There on the very edge of the Eye, we took stock of our losses. Seven warships lost with all hands. Five times that number damaged, some grievously. Thousands of legionaries gone, to say nothing of the mortal and mutant crews, or the priceless arsenals of wargear, gunships and battle tanks also fallen away into oblivion.

  In that long-ago era, before we had conceived of the Crimson Path, before Abaddon wearied of Cadia and wiped it from existence like excrement from his boot, the only reliable route out of the Great Eye was the so-called Cadian Gate. There, reality cut a deep gouge into Eyespace and soothed the seething tides. Yet a route out of the Eye is useless if it cannot even be reached in the first place.

  The worst aspect was that none of us had an answer to Lheor’s question. None of us knew what we could do to free the fleet from this etheric stalemate.

  The answer, when it came, was delivered in the form of destruction.

  I sensed nothing of the first asteroid. It was too swift for our storm-compromised auspex scanners to track. We only became aware of it when the troop barge Scarred Crown blared warning cries across the fleet-wide vox-web, and by then it was already too late to do anything. The Scarred Crown was already dying, its diminished wreckage rolling and tumbling through space. The asteroid that had slain it had shattered in the impact – I watched a spread of huge rocks, each one streaming fire like a comet’s tail, scattering into the misty void of Eyespace.

  Ultio closed her eyes, pressing a hand to her temple. ‘I…’

  She got no further. Another asteroid speared through the fleet, this time killing the Oath of Knives with a heart strike, bursting the cruiser’s void shields and driving through its core, triggering a terminal unleashing of plasma that instantly annihilated the entire superstructure.

  Ultio turned in her blood-streaked fluid tank, hands tensing once more into claws. ‘Translation signatures,’ she called out. And then, with her eyes widening, ‘Brace, brace.’

  The engines fired, the ship’s manoeuvring thrusters igniting along its starboard side. Every single soul aboard the Vengeful Spirit was thrown to the deck as the ship moved from all stop into a hard banking, rolling turn, the vessel protesting at the pressures put upon its hull.

  The third asteroid still hit us. All power failed in the wake of that wor
ld-shaking crash; it took several seconds to reactivate, during which time we existed in a shaking, thrashing realm of absolute blackness.

  When the illumination globes flared back to life, they cast their light over Ultio in her suspension chamber, psy-stigmatic bruises blackening the flesh of her back and shoulders. Blood trailed from her left eye, threading into the amniotic fluid.

  ‘Relighting voids,’ she mouthed as her gargoyles declared the words aloud. The ship stabilised, slowing in its roll. ‘Relighting voids. Seeking. Seeking.’

  On the oculus, views of Eyespace clicked through magnification filters as the Anamnesis followed the asteroids’ trajectories back to their origins.

  At first I thought we were witnessing our armada’s shadow cast across the swirling mists of Eyespace. I realised my error when I saw the vessels moving, and more warships penetrating the haze following behind them.

  ‘Shield failure,’ Ultio called out. ‘I am unable to rekindle the voids.’

  Abaddon watched from his central dais, eyes gleaming with vicious captivation. ‘Ultio, signal the fleet to form a defensive sphere. All warships are to protect the supply runners and troop barges. Run out the guns. All hands, prepare for battle.’

  ‘Another projectile,’ she warned.

  ‘Destroy it.’

  She tried, but she was wounded from the storm and too few of the Vengeful Spirit’s weapons were ready to fire. No matter how swiftly her gestalt mind operated, the calculations for void battle at such insane ranges required time and precision. We had the luxury of neither.

  Torpedoes sluiced from their chambers, silently cutting the misty darkness of space. Several impacted on the surface of the inbound hunk of planetary rock but most went wide, running harmlessly onwards.

  The frigate Skies of Wrath was already moving, rolling aside from the path of its oncoming doom. The asteroid hurtled past, illuminating the ship’s voids as it came within sparking distance of the vessel’s belly.