Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Khayon,’ Abaddon called, louder this time, ‘it’s over.’

  But I would not move.

  ‘What is it you want from this moment?’ Daravek asked me. ‘What is it you imagine may happen? That with only one arm, you will best me blade to blade? That you will bring your mighty sorcery to bear against me and drag my soul from my body?’

  I advanced on him, step by step. His warriors reached for their weapons, but I paid them no mind. As naked as I felt without Nagual and Nefertari hunting at my side, my blood sang with adrenal promise. I could kill him. I could kill Daravek now. I knew it.

  He was grinning, a slit of blackened teeth in a peeled-back maw. ‘Kneel,’ he said to me.

  And I knelt. My knees slammed against the wraithbone ground with an eerie chime. It was not the pose of a warrior pledging service, but that of a slave before his master. I sensed my brothers’ shock, but it was nothing compared to my own.

  Ezekyle, I tried to send in warning, but my silent voice was ­strangled, choked as surely as if the warlord’s hands were at my throat. I tried to rise, only to find myself locked with muscle cramps, my lungs seizing, scarcely able to draw breath.

  Daravek approached me, burning wings shedding feathers of ash, his rotting head haloed in ethereal majesty.

  ‘Apologise for this unseemly display,’ he said in a tone of infinite patience.

  I will carve your heart from–

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said. My mouth had moved. The words had spilled forth.

  ‘Forgive you for what?’ A bubble of dark fluid swelled and popped at the edge of Daravek’s mouth.

  I tried to stand. Instead, my throat vomited forth more quiet, calm words of surrender. ‘Forgive me for this unseemly display.’

  ‘Well done.’ He licked his teeth, making a show of tasting the oily saliva stringing between his fangs. ‘I’d wondered, Khayon, if you were hiding the truth from your brethren, fearful they might kill you for it. But I see the ignorance in your eyes now, and I realise you are ­hiding nothing. You simply don’t remember Drol Kheir.’

  There was nothing I could do about the loathsome mockery in his tone. ‘There is nothing to remember,’ I replied, trying and failing to rise from my knees. ‘It was a battle like any other.’

  His grin shed a treacly spume of poisoned ooze, and he said the words that had irritated me for years, words I had heard a hundred times and more.

  ‘Iskandar Khayon died at Drol Kheir.’

  That stupid rumour. Nothing more than the kind of false word of mouth that so often travelled between warbands in the unreliable winds of our hellish haven.

  Whatever control he held over me, it was loose enough then for me to speak. ‘You are a fool,’ I told him.

  ‘I know you died, Khayon,’ Daravek promised. ‘I was the one to tear open your throat.’

  The assault against my mind came without warning, too fragmented to be a memory but too vivid to be psychic implantation. Images and moments descended upon me, all out of any discernible order – and behind it, the strange touch of slow-dawning comprehension.

  Running knee-deep in the polluted, hissing snow of Drol Kheir. Blood spray flecking across the white slush.

  (blood my blood that is my blood)

  Bodies half-buried in the snow, rimed with frost the moment they fell. Alchemical fog so thick it resembled morning mist. The screaming of warriors and mutants drowning in the toxic smog.

  (do something sorcerer)

  The kick of my bolter. The hammering of drop pods as Ashur-Kai’s Rubricae joined mine, their arrival shaking the ground. The crash of my axe

  (Saern the axe of Fenrisian forge-fires)

  against a rusted, corroded crescent of a weapon: Daravek’s axe.

  (Iskandar Khayon we meet at last)

  The rushing of air

  (the crack of ceramite)

  and a feeling of weightlessness, of suffocation, of eyes sucked dry, of fingers numbed with frostbite, of your own skull weighing an impossible burden, of

  (you are mine, son of Magnus)

  a pressure, like telekinesis but not physical, a pressure against the soul itself and not the body. The ground not just shaking, but rattling as the sun is eclipsed by the shadow of an iron god.

  (Titans the god-machines walk)

  The screaming whine of a war-horn, warning those beneath it. The ozone reek-taste of overcharged, suffering void shields. The rage-born howl of a wolf. The rending of steel beneath heavy fur and razor fangs.

  (Gyre my wolf my lethal huntress torn from me destroyed by Horus Reborn)

  The suction of blood. The loosening of bone. The mincing of meat.

  (where is Nefertari why is she not here this was before she came to the Eye before she was my weapon)

  And then, at the edge of the sensory siege, the pathetic mercy of release

  (is this now)

  (is this then)

  The weakness and freedom of a puppet’s strings cut. The crash of ceramite against wraithbone.

  I looked up at Daravek now, here on Taial’shara, and exhaled a breath that tasted of old blood.

  ‘You cannot kill me,’ he said with sordid benevolence. ‘You are mine, Khayon. I tore your throat open three centuries ago and ripped your soul from the wound.’

  You lie, I knifed the words at him. YOU LIE. He deflected them with no effort at all.

  ‘I have no need to lie, little slave. Reflect upon what you have learned this day. Reflect upon just whom you serve.’

  I forced my gaze to the other legionaries at Daravek’s side. Was it true? How many of them were soul-bound in the same way?

  Daravek gestured with his axe. ‘Now go back to your master, assassin.’

  I gasped as I once more became the master of my own body. My muscles were in spasm, my nerves misfiring, but I rose to my feet through a red haze of pain, doing all I could to show I was not shaken by his effortless puppeteering of my body.

  First I sheathed my blade over my shoulder. Then I ignited the defiled war banner with a psychic kindling, burning it to ash in the span of three heartbeats. And then I picked up Ulrech’s iron grey helm, tipped it to drop the severed head onto the wraithbone ground and took the helmet with me – a trophy, to remember the moment.

  Yet my hearts were pounding. Shame coursed through me, shame and defeat. My failures were cast into stark relief now, and I think until that moment Abaddon had doubted my reports of the failed assassinations. It took the evidence of his own eyes to convince him.

  Now we knew why I had failed.

  None of my brothers offered comment on my supplication as I returned to their ranks. Telemachon edged away from me, as if my enthrallment to Daravek were infectious.

  Ilyaster applied armour cement to the stump of my arm after the most cursory examination; he was a practical creature, and losing limbs is hardly critical in terms of a legionary’s injuries.

  ‘Did you know?’ I asked him. ‘Did you know he killed me at Drol Kheir?’ The words were madness in my mouth. ‘Is it even true?’

  I could see in Ilyaster’s eyes that he knew nothing. After seeing me kneel he believed it was true, but no, he knew nothing for certain either way.

  Telemachon had met Abaddon’s eyes first, his silver face expressionless, but I sensed his slimy mirth at my weakness so brazenly revealed. He would doubtless speak with Abaddon alone – asking whether I could now be trusted, if I could ever have been trusted…

  Abaddon was sealed to me. He showed nothing, betrayed nothing. I had at least expected anger, but even that seemed absent.

  He called out to Daravek, ‘Unless you have another champion that wishes to die, Daravek, it’s time we spoke of this truce.’

  ‘I think your pet has proved his point, as I have proved mine.’ Daravek stepped forwards, mirroring Abaddon’s movement. ‘So let us
begin.’

  Ghosts of the Warp

  You know, as my gracious hosts, that my arm was restored between that day long ago and my captivity now. The changes wrought upon my flesh are visible as I stand here before you in this cell, ­shackled and blinded. My arm regrew – perhaps regenerated would be a fairer term – though it reformed in a far changed state than it had been before its loss.

  It was my first mutation, and far from my last. Ahriman’s Rubric banished mutation from the Thousand Sons, but only among those whom had little in the way of psychic talent, and only by destroying their physical forms. The rest of us are as prone to the warp’s whims and our own sins as any other being dwelling inside the Eye. If you believe my former brother Ahzek is entirely unchanged beneath his Eye-touched armour, you are as dangerously naïve as he was when he unmade our Legion.

  Ahriman believes he is perfectly unaltered. Did you know that? Yet I have seen the void that screams where his face used to be.

  As we met with Daravek, I did my best to ignore the ache of loss and the maddening phantasm of pain in fingers I no longer possessed, silently reciting Prosperine focusing mantras.

  ‘I can still feel my fingers,’ I said under my breath at one point.

  Ilyaster began to quietly detail the physiological reasons for this.

  ‘Silence, fools,’ Telemachon murmured, still focused on Abaddon and Daravek.

  I understood why Abaddon had chosen to only bring three of us, and I daresay it made a statement to Daravek regarding how little he intimidated us, but we were heavily outnumbered thanks to my lord’s posturing. I looked across the rank of warriors opposing us, recognising a couple of them from old battles. I had even served one of them, Ektral the Scaled, as a mercenary in the years before I wore the black. Whether these warriors comprised a new elite bodyguard for Daravek after Ilyaster and I had butchered his former kindred, or whether they were a gathering of lesser commanders meant to impress us, I could not be certain. All I knew was that we could not kill them all.

  Had Moriana predicted the details of this meeting? Had she seen its outcome? As much as I wished to know, I did not dare to risk a telepathic pulse to Abaddon, lest Daravek hear our shared thoughts. It was galling enough knowing he had the ability to read mine.

  The warp boiled in the night heavens above the broken dome. I heard its never-ending song louder here, as the essence of unreality whispered and sang to those who would be its champions. Abaddon and Daravek were nexuses for these half-seen, half-felt forces, though I could make out no real meaning in the voices calling to them. Not that ‘voices’ is even an accurate word, given the primal forces sinking gentle claws into both warriors’ souls. Such nebulous sound was merely how my too-mortal consciousness conceived of the powers at play.

  Watching the twisting sky put me in mind of Abaddon’s confession after my return from Maeleum. When he had informed the Ezekarion of the pressures grasping at his spirit, that too had been a matter for intelligences not limited by mortality. Abaddon had little in the way of answers himself, merely citing a compulsion – a physical and spiritual need – to reach back into real space and seek the source of the warpsong he never stopped hearing.

  ‘I see a sword forged in a sunset,’ he had told us in a strained tone. ‘I see a star dying, and its ash used to fuel the engines of a great throne of gold. I see the first murder, where brother kills brother, where the rage of the slayer and the agony of the slain becomes a tempest behind the veil.’

  He had spoken like this for some time. I did not mock him for such poesies. I did not laugh at them; I dreaded them. Never had I witnessed him so close to breaking apart. Seeing Abaddon murmur of his haunted dreams in a prophecy-soaked whisper was one of the most unnerving sights I have ever seen. His golden eyes glazed over with cataracts of distracted madness, as though someone or something had reached into his brain to puppeteer his fanged mouth to speak on its behalf.

  The warp promised him this unimaginable prize in a ceaseless song, and yet he had no way of knowing what this treasure truly was. Whatever it was, its presence was a clarion call throughout the empyrean’s tides. It inhaled hope and exhaled promise.

  ‘Is it a daemon?’ Lheor had asked, as awed and uneasy as the rest of us. ‘How can you trust such an offer?’

  ‘I don’t need to trust it,’ Abaddon snapped back from his polluted reverie. ‘I need only to master it.’

  ‘It will be yours,’ Moriana promised him. ‘From the moment you claim it until you wear the Emperor’s crown upon your brow, it will be your companion and your weapon.’

  Few of us were convinced. Amurael spoke for us.

  ‘For this,’ he said, ‘you would fight a war?’

  ‘The war is sacrosanct,’ Abaddon replied. ‘And it is ours, not mine. We will return to the Imperium and bring fire to those deluded souls who fight beneath the False Emperor’s banners. This is vindicta. This is why we wear the black. Whatever else waits outside the Eye, I will kill or claim as the need arises.’

  We knew so little about Drach’nyen then. I think back to our ignorance in those nights with a sense of something akin to purity. For all the strength Abaddon’s blade has granted to us down the centuries, and for all of the victories reaped with its screaming edge, it remains a cancer threatening to blacken my brother’s heart. I believe none of its whispers. None at all.

  Throughout the negotiations on Taial’shara, I layered my psychic resistances in the hope of defeating Daravek’s casual rifling of my mind. All the while I watched for the ambush that seemed inevitable. Daravek had us where he wanted us. The idea he might not take this chance to kill Abaddon was laughable.

  Worse was the thought that he could make me turn on my lord, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Yet, if it was within his power, why had he not already willed it to happen?

  There was no answer to this. At least, none that I could see.

  His warriors’ thoughts were calm and assured. They seemed certain of their dominance in the truce. They had come to make demands from what they perceived as a weaker foe, not to make an agreement with them.

  The negotiations themselves were torturous, as they so often are between the Eye’s warbands. Our relative strengths only added to the difficulty in reaching a resolution. Both sides had no wish to leave their fleets alone for too long, lest conflict break out according to some previously planned betrayal.

  We could not destroy their fleet without taking horrendous casual­ties, diminishing any hope of bleeding the Imperium regardless of whether Sigismund’s Black Templars waited for us or not. They could not face us without the risk of sustaining the same losses. The promise of mutually assured destruction had a way of calming even the fiercest hearts. Yet their demands rained upon us. Daravek wanted ships, warriors and materiel in exchange for holding off from an attack. Again and again he made his smirking insistences, assured that Abaddon would capitulate to preserve the bulk of our fleet.

  ‘I will give you nothing,’ Abaddon replied each time. When he wearied of Daravek’s perseverance, he looked longingly at the Talon. Its autoloaders cycled in clanking response to his fading patience. ‘Shall I tell you what I believe, Thagus?’

  Thagus was taller than Abaddon – a rare sight given that Abaddon was cast in Horus’ image. The Lord of Hosts, swollen by his supplication to the Powers, inclined his head in generous benediction, as if granting a favour to a particularly amusing servant. The three of us bristled at the insult, but Abaddon only smiled.

  ‘Speak,’ Daravek intoned.

  ‘I believe you are likewise trapped in the storm.’ Abaddon was holding his anger back, binding it tight, showing it only in the flashing gold of his soul-stained eyes. ‘I believe the warp aided your pursuit of us, then cut you adrift in our wake, leaving you becalmed and with no idea why. I believe that the malignant essences we call Gods have brought us together here in the heart of this storm to play out a ga
me of kings and pawns, just to decide where their favour should fall.’

  ‘You have an admirable imagination, son of Horus.’

  Abaddon refused to rise to the bait. ‘I believe, most of all, that you are frightened of us.’

  He scraped the Talon’s claws together. Several of Daravek’s warriors brought their hands inching closer to their bolters. We held motionless in response, lest mirroring their gesture provoke them into breaking the truce.

  ‘You fear us,’ Abaddon continued, ‘because despite your raving speeches that we are betraying the Legions, and despite your petty crusades to destroy us, we not only survive, but thrive. We grow with every conflict. The icons of the failed Legions are sheared from ever more suits of armour, and the colours of shame are eclipsed in numbers no other warband can match. You fear that we are right, and that you are wrong. You fear us, more than any other reason, because you had to chase us. Because we were here first. Because we are the ones on the verge of breaking free, despite all your attempts in these last ­decades to hinder us. We have been working towards this fate, while you have done nothing but seek to stop us. We’ve fought for true unity, all brothers beneath the black banner, while you’ve fought against it in the guise of preserving the old, failed ways. We, Thagus, have acted. You have reacted.’

  Abaddon’s gaze had roamed across the other legionaries as he spoke, and now it returned to Daravek. ‘And here we stand at our prison’s edge. Even now you have no answers to give your men. Instead you force this meeting with us, praying you can glean insight into our plans and scavenge victory through threats. You’ll lose this war, Thagus. You’ll lose because you desire the Gods’ favour and you fear it falling upon anyone else.’

  Daravek opened his jaws. Black slime ran between the sewer grate of his teeth. ‘You are not the only one to dream of the End of Empires,’ he warned. ‘You are not the only one that hears Drach’nyen’s call.’

  ‘No,’ Abaddon admitted, ‘but which one of us hears it louder? Who hears it clearer? The one seeking it, or the one chasing the seeker?’ Abaddon turned away before Daravek could reply, speaking as he walked back to us. ‘If you’re so certain of your strength, Thagus Daravek, come test it against my Black Legion now. The Vengeful Spirit hungers.’