Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Telemachon stepped forwards, as was expected of Abaddon’s champion. No deadlier fighter existed within the Black Legion. He was already drawing his blades when Abaddon lifted the Talon, halting his advance.

  ‘I have no need to waste my finest warrior’s time,’ he said with vicious reasonableness. ‘Telemachon, stay back, please. Khayon?’

  I believe I actually blinked in surprise. ‘My brother?’

  Abaddon aimed the Talon at the towering form of Ulrech Ansontyn. ‘Kill him.’

  I hesitated, and that triggered guttural laughter from the warriors opposing us. Telemachon murmured beneath his breath, some unknown sound of displeasure. He wanted this fight. I was inclined to let him take it, but my lord had spoken.

  ‘As you wish,’ I replied with far more confidence than I felt.

  ‘No sorcery,’ Daravek called out with a bladed grin. ‘This is a matter for swords to settle.’

  Abaddon gave a lazy gesture of agreement, and in doing so, I was sure he had killed me.

  I stepped forwards, drawing Sacramentum, letting its silver length turn violet beneath the storm’s tainted light. When I returned Ulrech’s salute, he remained silent.

  Daravek spoke as the two of us drew close. ‘Ansontyn has killed thirty-one warriors in single combat. How many have you slain in these duels, assassin?’

  ‘Three,’ I replied. This caused fresh laughter from the ranks at Dara­vek’s side.

  Ulrech held his blade at the ready. The claws of unformed daemons caressed across his armour plating, where brass icons of skulled faces stared cold and eyeless. Spirits of pain ringed his own skull in a crown of bleak light. His voice was a peal of thunder.

  ‘I dedicate your death to the God of Blood and Battle.’

  I had thought he might say that.

  He did not wait to see if I had a similar benediction; he attacked at once, his sword flaring to life and cutting the air with the waspish buzz of its power field. Sacramentum snapped to life with a much smoother purr, a testament to the artisanship of its creation.

  Most champions, like Nefertari and Telemachon, are consummately talented in single combat. They are duellists as much as warriors – often more so – devoting their lives and souls to the pursuit of perfection in the art of fighting a single foe. I had expected the first exchanges of my duel with Ulrech to follow the same pattern: focusing on learning, not immediately seeking to kill. We would trade blows, study the positioning of one another’s bodies, ascertain what schools of blade work we preferred and measure the flow and feel of the fight. This was how most duels began, where expertise and skill mattered far more than in the grinding crash of war. Though some duellists may not admit it, it also allows the muscles to warm, the blood to flow and the adrenal narcotics in our armour systems to flood through, buying time for a combatant to immerse himself in the fight.

  Ulrech had other ideas. He considered himself far above me in terms of swordsmanship, or else believed he could kill me while his blood was still cold, for he advanced at once, laying into me with a succession of blows that I barely blocked with the flat of my priceless sword.

  I gave ground with each parry. Several of Daravek’s warriors shouted their approval to see me on the defensive already. They suspected a swift end to the fight.

  The Thousand Sons were never renowned as the most martial of Legions, and it was often said we relied too heavily on our psychic gifts to win wars. There was perhaps some truth to this accusation, but we were individually no less skilful than our cousins among the other Legions, even before taking into account the years of blood and battle since Horus’ rebellion. Where many warriors fought through instinct and rote, we added a scholarly approach to duelling, with mental techniques of focus in tune with the meditative kata found among the more philosophical martial arts. The principles of balance, of action and reaction, of how to lead an opponent into revealing the flaws of their technique and how to avoid their lures in kind – all of these aspects of battle were drilled into our consciousnesses in the years of our training on Tizca and the warfare that followed. Against our more savage or rigorously trained kindred, such personal discipline evened the odds.

  So I was calm in the face of Ulrech’s overwhelming force – at least outwardly. Such was the power and speed of his blows that I struggled to maintain my battle focus. I imagined Telemachon watching, disgusted with my performance. I imagined Abaddon’s eyes on me, unblinking in their judgement. I was no longer unsure of his motives – certain, instead, that he had committed me to this fight in order to see me die. The rewards of my failures, reaped at last. And how apt that it would be before Daravek himself, and brought about by the Lord of Hosts’ own champion.

  Ulrech drew first blood. He took advantage of a poor deflection to risk a cut to my torso, carving a slashing ravine across my breastplate. The cheers from his brethren redoubled.

  Focus, I warned myself.

  Our blades met, locked close to the hilts. We were close enough for me to see the reflection of my black battleplate in the filthy silver of Ulrech’s ceramite.

  ‘Why do you stand with him?’ I asked the Iron Warrior, seeking any hesitation in his movements. There was none. ‘Why do you stand with Daravek?’

  Ulrech held the lock for a moment until we both disengaged, stepping back as one. ‘Abaddon is no less a tyrant,’ was the swordsman’s curt reply.

  I did not argue that point. Our blades clashed in a series of swings and parries; I refused to give ground now, deflecting what I could and weaving aside from what I could not. We were only metres away from my brothers. There was nowhere left to go.

  Ulrech was not as silent as I had suspected – he spoke as our blades’ power fields repelled one another with snarls of abused energy.

  ‘Why did you abandon your Legion?’

  I confess, the question surprised me. ‘To escape the shadows of our failed fathers,’ I said. ‘From shame and shadow recast. In black and gold reborn.’

  ‘The battle cry of a false Legion,’ Ulrech grunted.

  ‘The battle cry of a new way. A new war.’

  ‘You cannot outrun shame,’ the terse warrior growled.

  ‘Those who do not learn from the past,’ I countered, ‘are condemned to repeat it.’

  We crossed blades again and again, neither of us managing to score second blood. I was getting the measure of his swordplay, which was at worst masterful and at best exquisite. Telemachon might have beaten him by now. It was all I could do to maintain the deadlock.

  ‘I’m growing bored, Khayon,’ Abaddon called to me. ‘End it.’

  Blood of the Gods, but I was trying. I feinted with a carving slash that became a throat thrust when Ulrech took the bait, only to have Sacramentum’s blade hammered aside when the Iron Warrior instantly recovered.

  ‘Maeleum,’ Abaddon said to Daravek, across the duel. I refused to let their words distract me. ‘That was an inspired piece of spite.’

  Daravek’s immense wings rippled, wafting us with a breeze of charcoal-stinking air. ‘Maeleum was the least of the insults I inflicted upon your domain, Ezekyle.’

  Abaddon no longer sounded amused. ‘Is that so.’

  Daravek began to list his roll of the discord and dishonour his forces had inflicted upon us. For the weeks it had taken us to sail to the Eye’s edge, months had passed for the Lord of Hosts’ armada. They had rampaged through our territory, bringing ruin to our garrisons, raining destruction upon our fortresses.

  Daravek related it all, battle by battle and fall by fall, in meticulous and lascivious detail. Ulrech and I punctuated the warlord’s delighted screed with the thrum and crash of active power fields, our duel continuing throughout the recitation.

  A legionary is a transhuman construct, but humanity still forms our cores. We are not created without flaws, and the individual motions of a battle or a duel are not always easy to recal
l, even to our eidetic memories. This is because of that most unstable of elements: emotion. Anger especially can cloud a warrior’s otherwise clear recollection, staining memory red, bathing it in feverish heat.

  With every word that left Daravek’s mutated mouth, I found it harder to maintain my duellist’s meditation. My focus began to slip. I started catching Ulrech’s blows on instinct as much as by observance of his posture or prediction based on his muscle movements. Worse, I felt the insipid creep of unease needling its way through my mind – a physical sensation, cold down my spine. My meditative principles were the best chance I had at surviving this fight, and Abaddon, curse him, had invited Daravek to speak his venom at the worst possible moment.

  On and on went the recitation of inflicted pain. Maeleum savaged by orbital bombardment, whole tectonic chunks of the world broken free and loaded into his fleet’s mass drivers. We considered the grave world useless, but the symbolism in the act could not be ignored. And worse was yet to come.

  Three of our warships now sailed with Daravek’s armada, taken as plunder in battle, their defenders overwhelmed and their surviving crews enslaved to the whips of Daravek’s overseers. The others were destroyed or lost in Eyespace, driven away from the regions they had sworn to protect.

  Hostages had been taken from the warship Song of Wrath, the flagship of the modest fleet we had left to watch over our territory. Its commander, Ranegar Coval, was one of those captured.

  I knew Coval well. A former Sons of Horus legionary and lieutenant to Fleetmaster Valicar, he was a stern and intuitive presence, adding his measured, aggressive wisdom to Valicar’s cold, defensive calculations.

  Daravek’s men had peeled him from his armour with mining lasers, bound him with chains between two Land Raiders and torn him apart. While he still lived, torn in two, they had fed him to the daemon-hounds shackled to the command throne aboard Daravek’s flagship.

  Other fates for our warriors were no less dishonourable. Crippled and wounded, some were lowered into vats of industrial acid; others were slowly crushed beneath the slow-rolling treads of battle tanks while packs of Daravek’s mutant slaves looked on and jeered.

  The final insult came when Daravek gestured one of his warriors forwards, almost to the edge of the duel. The World Eater dropped a stinking black cloak onto the wraithbone floor. At once I was struck by the reek of piss from the dark cloth, the stench old and rank and sour. The World Eater kicked the cloak to unroll it – I only heard it happen, as I could not spare the attention to look – but the reaction from my brothers told me the truth as easily as my eyes would have. Abaddon exhaled a feral breath. Ilyaster’s armour joints growled as they tensed. Even Telemachon murmured a sibilant hiss, the closest he came to showing his displeasure.

  The next time I disengaged from Ulrech I dared to steal a glance, and sure enough, I had guessed right. The cloth was not a cloak at all. The slitted Eye of Horus, set in the sunburst yellow of the Eightfold Path, stared open, stained, from the middle of the cloth.

  The cloth had wrapped a handful of bones, still reddened with blood marks and stringy with ligaments, marked with the engravings of fangs where they had been gnawed.

  The banner of the Black Legion. They had had taken one of our banners, used it as a funeral shroud for Ranegar Coval’s daemon-chewed bones and then let their slave hordes soak it with streams of tainted piss.

  Screaming marred the duel now. Throaty, wrathful roars that I didn’t realise, until I ran out of breath, were rising from my throat. All serenity and meditative thought was lost, replaced by a red focus. I advanced on Ulrech, laying my entire weight into every blow. Sparks sprayed from protesting power fields. They shrieked together with the abuse of every clashing parry. I rained two-handed blows against him, faster than I could ever recall fighting, faster than I believe I have ever moved since.

  He beat my guard several times, for I fought with almost no guard at all. Yet he failed to land any true wounds; every time his blade scored my battleplate, he was forced to pull back and defend himself again.

  I knew I could not win. I did not care. Even when I had him on the defensive, he was a better, faster fighter than me. He gave ground, blocking and deflecting instead of risking any attack, but I could not break his guard down. I still did not care. Roaring, my senses choked by the waste-stink of our defiled banner and my brother’s bloodstained bones, I attacked without thought of the wounds I would take.

  I wanted blood. I wanted to steal life, as it had been stolen. I wanted revenge.

  This is vindicta. This is what I speak of when I say it fuels the hearts of the Black Legion’s warriors, when I say it beats with the blood in our veins. Revenge at any cost. Vengeance no matter what.

  There was no revelation of truth suddenly burning in my mind, no flash of bleak clarity that dispersed the red fury. Later, Tele­machon would offer his blademaster’s perspective – that the only way I could win was to not care if I lost. All combatants still seek to protect themselves even in the bloodiest heat of battle. Even the World Eaters, when the Nails bite into their brains, will defend themselves on instinct and through the blessings of gladiatorial muscle memory.

  That day, against Ulrech, I abandoned all efforts to survive. Vindicta flowed through my skull instead of rational thought.

  I gave him my arm.

  Willingly, as a sacrifice to slow his blade. It happened in a hundredth of the time it takes to retell. A backhanded blow to batter his sword aside. A flaring burst of a power field. A sonic boom that thunder-cracked my forearm.

  I thrust forwards in the very same second. I will never forget the sick ease with which Sacramentum slid in – its hilt kissing the shattered ceramite of Ulrech’s chest – nor the agonised flexion of his entire body as I twisted the blade where it was buried inside his primary heart. I pulled Sacramentum free with a sweeping yank, annihilating at least one of his three lungs on the way back out.

  Blood sizzled, evaporating on my blade’s edge. I was already moving, bringing Sacramentum down on Ulrech’s sword arm, shattering his fist and the power generator in the blade’s grip. On the backswing, I hammered my blade into his side, where it cut deep and stuck fast. He had staggered away, ruining a blow that would have severed him at the waist, but he was slowed by his internal injuries. I kept my grip on Sacramentum, stepped closer and dragged the blade free, my boot thudding into Ulrech’s shattered breastplate for leverage.

  I backed away from the Iron Warrior who, damn him, still refused to fall. One-handed, his organs doubtless aflame with pain and threatening to cease functioning, he still refused to yield. He watched, wheezing through his helm’s grille, looking between me and his fallen, broken sword.

  Fire ignited along my left arm. Pain suppressants squirted into my bloodstream, and I flinched at the sight of my arm ended at the elbow. The stump of ceramite spat a couple of sparks and dripped treacly blood as the wound already began to seal. I had never been mutilated before. I could not rectify what I was seeing with reality, not even when I saw my hand and forearm on the ground, the armour plating shattered.

  I wanted to finish Ulrech. I wanted nothing more than to take his head and hold it high, crying out my triumph to the mad Gods that watched over us. I could feel the warp itself wanting the same fate, as unseen winds carried the whispers of daemons waiting to be born from the barbaric act.

  But I lowered my blade. Against every instinct, I lowered Sacramentum and forced the words through my ragged breathing. In the earliest days, this was our way. Abaddon’s offer had to be made. It was our Legion’s law, whenever we faced an opponent worthy of hearing it.

  ‘It is over,’ I told Ulrech. He knew it as well as I did. ‘But I would have you as a brother, Ulrech Ansontyn. From shame and shadow recast. In black and gold reborn.’

  I felt Abaddon’s eyes on me. I had expected my lord to be furious after Daravek’s insulting recitations of his desecrations against
us, but the opposite was true. Had his temper been a ruse? He was calm now, his aura tightly controlled, betraying only the faintest hint of amused pleasure.

  What did I tell you, he sent to me silently, the words rich with pride. You had to rediscover your hatred, just as I said.

  I was watching Ulrech. ‘My offer is sincere,’ I said to him.

  And it was, though I admit that I wanted him to refuse. I wanted to kill him for everything he and the others of Daravek’s armada had done, but I knew the words were right the moment I spoke them. I would never be able to forgive him, but I would trust his spite and rage at my side in the Long War.

  His breath was a wheezing saw. It sounded like a chainsword choking on inferior fuel. Perhaps I had sundered two of his lungs and damaged the third, after all.

  Ansontyn took a step towards me. And there he died.

  His helmeted head rolled to the side. His headless body dropped to its knees and folded upon itself with that familiar, dull resonance of ceramite striking ceramite.

  Behind the fallen corpse, Daravek swung his axe to the side, flicking blood from its blade. Some of those flecks landed on the black banner, which can only have been intentional.

  ‘You petty creature,’ I spat at Daravek.

  ‘Khayon, it’s over.’ Abaddon beckoned me back to his side. I refused to heed him.

  ‘You are next,’ I promised Thagus Daravek. The numb throb of my amputated arm was an irritating distraction. I concentrated, forcing the flesh to reknit, beginning the process of regrowth that would take time even with psychic gifts. Yet I levelled my sword, pointing its tip at the warlord whom I had failed to kill so many times before. ‘You are next.’

  ‘They shame you, don’t they?’ he asked in calm reply. ‘All of those failures.’

  He could read my thoughts. Effortlessly. Never had I met any other sorcerer capable of piercing my mind without monumental effort, if at all.