Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  But that day she gripped my wrist with a strength that had long since ceased to surprise me, her gauntleted fingers softly scraping against the adamantine-reinforced gold.

  ‘It is changing,’ she pointed out, looking at the shining metal. Her slanted eyes, inhuman and elfin, tended to blink too swiftly for even my enhanced vision to track. Only in moments of genuine surprise did I ever see a flicker of her eyelashes, in what passed for a languid blink among the eldar. ‘You are changing,’ she added.

  I pulled back from her, looking down at my forearm and palm. I closed and opened my fingers experimentally, hearing the quiet clicks and purring gears of the artificer’s miracle I possessed as part of my body. Strange to think that those clicking cogs and servos were my joints now.

  Nefertari was right. It was changing. Subtly but surely, where the flesh met the metal, the union was becoming an unnatural amalgamation of both. I looked closer at my fingers, where Ceraxia’s perfectionism had driven her to render acid-etched engravings of my fingerprints, copied from my genetic records. They remained unchanged. On the other side, though, my metal knuckles were ­paling in a way I recognised from the transfigured, incomparably strong ivory that formed on the plating of some warriors’ armour, binding them into their ceramite. Bone spurs were forming in the gold.

  In time, my arm became what you see before you now, as I stand here chained to the wall. Witness the shining gold, etched with primitive cuneiform carvings that curse me for bringing my father Magnus to his knees. Witness the hand itself: how the gold still bears my finger­prints, yet the back of my hand bears that biomechanical slitted eye of gold-lidded, blood-filled glass. Witness the spurs of trans­mogrified ivory at my knuckles, hooked like vicious spines. I have killed with them, more than once.

  But the process was only beginning then, and I could not have predicted its outcome.

  It was as I regarded my arm that Tokugra, Ashur-Kai’s crow, melted out of the shadows above me and fluttered to a rest on my shoulder. I had not seen the familiar since Ashur-Kai’s capture, and had believed it simply perished without him, its form haemorrhaging back into the warp.

  Boy. The greeting curdled directly within my brain, sounding like nothing any natural crow could ever produce.

  You have not discorporated, Tokugra. Do you cling to existence long enough to provide a meal for Nagual?

  My lynx gave a great yawn where he lay in feline repose. His tail swished once then stilled. The crow ruffled its feathers at this display, then began to preen itself. Every one of these acts were entirely unnecessary given the daemons’ etheric states. Sometimes their symbolic lifelikeness amused me, and sometimes it irritated me, but it always managed to intrigue me. You could never be certain what traits a familiar would mimic from its host form. I have seen familiars take the form of books on mechanical legs that slam closed when threatened, and bio-clockwork knights that duel with vermin. Every sorcerer has his or her own tastes.

  Boy, the crow sent again, more aggravated now. It was not bound to me, and found communicating with me either difficult or distasteful. I could feel its physical form becoming unstable with the strain of trying to force its thoughts into mine. What followed came in a toxic tangle of words, akin to a child’s slumber rhyme.

  One last echo of my master’s pains, spoken before he was taken in chains. If the boy faces Daravek eye to eye. Tell him. Tell him. The boy will die.

  Ashur-Kai’s words. Or, rather, Ashur-Kai’s warning, delivered through Tokugra’s fanciful and fleeting mind. It was the most coherent communication I had ever received from Ashur-Kai’s familiar, and I could sense how the effort cost the weakened creature much of its remaining strength. And there was more:

  One hundred howls encaged. Beating heart of Daravek’s rage. Boy must listen. Boy must see. Do not know why. Howls are the key.

  I reached for Tokugra with my senses, trying to keep its form stable, but the creature was not pacted to me, and I had no power over its corpus. I wanted more, needing to know far more of the context behind that warning, but the crow had done all it could. I suspected that even maintaining its form to reach me had required a journey of unknowable daemonic endurance. That was surely why it had taken so long after Ashur-Kai’s disappearance.

  I had no love for prophecy – not then, and not in the centuries since – but these were my former mentor’s last words, sent at great cost. His final prophecy, telling me what I must do to stay alive when I faced Daravek. Will you consider me a hypocrite if I confess that those words took root within my mind? I did not know what to do with them – I did not understand them, but nor could I simply ignore them.

  Thank you, Tokugra.

  Boy, it sent back in acknowledgement. It took wing, melting back into the shadows overhead, swallowed by them. Unbound, it could not hold its form together for long, and it was gone, I was sure, back into the primal matter of the warp. I doubted I would ever see it again.

  Templars

  Saronos had taken Ashur-Kai’s place on the platform. Sometimes I came to the bridge to watch him stand where the White Seer had once stood, guiding the ship through the warp’s unquiet tides. Ultio worked with him, her concentration absolute. What they lacked in the familiarity she had developed with her sacrificed void-guide, Saronos made up for with his unnatural mastery. He stood with both hands on the control pylons that Ashur-Kai had fashioned with his own craftsmanship, sending the adjustments in course and calculation through to the Anamnesis. She answered in symbiosis: leaning, tilting, swimming.

  No journey through Eyespace is tranquil – the realm defeats all astronavigation attempts as often as it allows them – but the ­Vengeful Spirit no longer threatened to shake itself apart. Looking into the thrashing mess of energies outside the ship revealed that we sailed through channels of relative calm, as Saronos stared into the oculus and murmured soft, poetic chants in a tongue I had never heard before. Sometimes it seemed as if he was trying to soothe the ship’s machine-spirit. Sometimes it sounded as if he were trying to add the coldly lulling words to a greater ritual taking place outside our perceptions. Whatever the truth, both occurrences were less troubling than the many hours he stood there in absolute silence, his head hanging slack. By what sense he looked out and discerned a path through the storm, I could not say.

  Abaddon remained enthroned the entire time, staring into Eyespace with the same focus writ upon Ultio’s features. Hunger radiated from him, a starvation that devoured him, reflected in the fevered glare of his golden eyes. He refused all conversation, only speaking to me once, with a single demand.

  ‘Is Daravek following us?’

  ‘How could he?’ Lheor replied, at my side.

  It was possible. I had to concede that. Perhaps even likely, if Daravek’s sorcerers could find traces of our wake, or locate the same pathways Saronos and his Warp Ghosts were using. If they were pathways at all; Saronos was hardly forthcoming.

  I was not the first one Abaddon asked. Ultio’s sensors could not pierce this region of Eyespace, nor could any of us detect any signs of pursuit. The warp outside was a shroud, and we paid the price for its serenity by sailing blind to whatever might chase us.

  All the while, I thought of Ashur-Kai’s final warning. His last prophecy.­ If I faced Daravek, I would die. Did that mean a confrontation was inevitable? What if the Lord of Hosts pursued us?

  Lheor was typically blunt on the matter when I shared it with him. He clacked his metal teeth together, feigning a bite at one of the unborn spirits of pain that drifted around his head in a red halo.

  ‘You’ve already proved you can’t kill him,’ Lheor said of Daravek. ‘So it hardly takes a seer to know who’d win the fight.’

  Amurael, who often joined us in the sparring cages, concurred with Lheor, albeit less obnoxiously. ‘You’re looking at this the wrong way,’ he added afterwards. ‘Ashur-Kai wouldn’t waste his last words relating something you already k
new.’

  I agreed. I had thought the same. ‘He warned of me confronting Daravek eye to eye. It seems to be a warning to slay him without facing him.’

  Amurael’s fangs flashed in amusement. ‘You’ve already tried that, Khayon. You wasted a year trying it.’

  And well I knew it. ‘Then I will try harder,’ I said, hoping the words did not sound as hollow as they felt.

  It was like this for some time, as we sailed onwards towards the Eye’s edge. The Black Legion looked ahead to the promise of escape, but I found myself looking behind, thinking of duties undone, knowing there would be a reckoning before the last day dawned. I could not allow Daravek to live. Not after the mystifying power he had demonstrated over me. I would end him somehow. I would find a way.

  ‘Abaddon would approve of you thinking like this,’ Amurael pointed out. ‘He’d consider it another encouraging sign of your vindicta returning.’

  Lheor and Amurael were duelling as the three of us spoke. I was cleaning my weapons, maintaining them aloft with an insignificant whim of telekinesis. Three daggers, my ritual jamdhara blade, Sacramentum, my archeotech tri-mouthed laser pistol, my boltgun – all of them revolved slowly in the air before me, psychically stripped with a peeling, searing heat that flensed them of any corrosion.

  ‘So the matter of my fury is something he discusses with you all? Does Abaddon speak of your failings as freely as he speaks of mine?’

  That stopped their duel. Both of my brothers looked to me, and Lheor laughed with typically toothy malice.

  ‘You realise that while you’re away on your endless hunts, we have better things to do than discuss you? Some of us have wars to fight, Khayon. You can earn Abaddon’s favour by cutting a few throats. The rest of us lead armies into battle.’

  Lheor raised his blade again, beckoning to Amurael to continue the fight. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘I have no failings.’

  The Warp Ghosts were true to their sepulchral words. They guided us through the storm, from the Eye’s realm to the stark cold of real space.

  How to describe that moment of freedom? The truth is that there was no exultation, nor even relief. The feeling was one of creeping awareness, an awakening that took firmer hold with every heartbeat. I had expected cheers and cries of defiant rage. Yet as the Eye’s violet mists thinned, as we looked upon unpoisoned stars for the first time in a span of mangled chronology, the silence was deafening.

  The shudders that forever ran through the ship’s bones even in the Eye’s calmest regions subsided, and the sudden quiet was practically a physical force, hammering against our senses. Some of the mutants and humans on the lower decks, mostly those who had been born within the Great Eye and never left its boundaries, for whom corporeal reality was an unimaginable concept, purportedly lost their minds. They had lived their lives with the sound and threat of claws raking against the hull. Without it… Well, reality was alien to them. I would not wish to speculate on the mechanics of their minds. All legionaries’ brain patterns and cognitive functions are undeniably altered by our hellish sanctuary, but to have been born there and know no other existence? I tended to keep my senses away from their thoughts. Let that suffice.

  Saronos lifted his hands from the navigational pylons. Ultio’s breath was audible across the entire bridge, a relieved sigh from the mouths of her vox-gargoyles. Her ship had slipped free of those painful tides, returning to the natural void at last.

  I no longer heard the whispering pleas and taunts of unformed daemons begging me to bring them into being. The chronometric runes at the edge of my retinal display began to tick in the right direction once more, marking time going forwards.

  Ilyaster turned his skullish gaze to the oculus, which had become a painting of perfect stars. I did not know him well then, and his sunken features were slackened in an expression I struggled to recognise. At first I thought he might be weeping as he bore witness to our emancipation. With hindsight, I believe what I saw there was dread. We had been trapped in the underworld for so long, waging ceaseless war within our haven, that reality was now a realm of immense, insane emptiness.

  Abaddon alone seemed unmoved by the transition. He listened to the crew stations sounding off their stuttering and overwhelmed status reports, then he received relayed word from the rest of the fleet as they drifted into real space in our wake. All of them made it through. Not a single vessel was lost. I had to check the records myself to ascertain that it was true, for I could scarcely believe such a thing was possible.

  ‘Auspex,’ Abaddon called to Ultio.

  Even the Anamnesis was moved by breaking back into reality. Her eyes betrayed her disorientation, as she sought to process space that existed in a mere three dimensions once more, without the endless orchestra of madness tearing at her shields and the iron skin of her hull.

  ‘I see nothing,’ she declared. ‘Ahead of us, the void is silent.’

  ‘Keep your eyes open, my huntress. I doubt it will remain that way for long.’

  Abaddon remained enthroned as Saronos approached him, and he bade the Warp Ghost rise when cursory obeisance was made.

  ‘You have done all you promised,’ Abaddon said.

  ‘As was agreed,’ Saronos replied.

  ‘Though you leave several of my warships without void-guides.’

  ‘As was also agreed. You speak irrelevancies, Ezekyle Abaddon.’ My lord’s lip curled at that in something approximating amusement.

  Ilyaster approached, his black Terminator plate growling. ‘What if we need your services again?’

  Saronos turned his head to the newest of the Ezekarion. ‘We have always served the Black Legion, when the Black Legion has met our price.’

  I cannot have been the only one whose skin crawled with the temporal promise of the words. Abaddon’s eyes narrowed to golden slits. ‘You have always served us?’

  A cawing cry sounded from the shadowed rafters, and a daemonic crow spiralled down to land on the Warp Ghost’s shoulder. It watched me with misted eyes, weak with the threat of discorporation, the smoke of its plumage thin to the point of transparency.

  Tokugra?

  It did not answer me. Saronos paid the daemon no heed either, even when it began scratching its claws on the mottled grey ceramite upon which it perched.

  Saronos inclined his head respectfully to the warrior upon the throne. ‘Goodbye, Ezekyle Abaddon.’

  I found myself stepping forwards from the disorganised ranks, approaching the Warp Ghost, removing my helmet as I drew near.

  ‘Hold,’ I bid him. All eyes were upon me as I came almost within arm’s reach of the grey warrior. ‘Show me your face.’

  The red eye-lenses burned with indifference. ‘You speak irrelevancies.’

  ‘Nothing I speak is irrelevant to me, or to my Legion. It is a simple enough request, Saronos.’

  I had expected him to refuse. Instead, Saronos disengaged the seals at his collar, and the crow fluttered, shifting to his back-mounted power pack. There was a snap-hiss as Saronos’ armour depressurised, and he pulled the helmet clear.

  His skin was white, as was his long hair, the latter spilling free from its bindings as his helm came off. His eyes were red, and his face bore only minor alterations – the darkness of the veins beneath his sallow flesh was a map of the minor mutations in his bloodstream. He looked older than he had when I had last looked upon him, though he seemed no wearier, not even for the efforts of guiding the Vengeful­ Spirit and ferrying our souls back to reality.

  Tokugra cawed, the sound ragged and weak. Murmurs began across the bridge. Ultio’s gargoyles relayed her soft gasp. I glanced to Abaddon, only to see him watching with unsurprised acceptance.

  I breathed Saronos’ name, though not as it was now; I spoke his name as I had always known it.

  ‘Ashur-Kai.’

  His features did not flicker. They did not even twitch. �
��You speak irrelevancies, Sekhandur.’

  You know me, I sent to him. You called me Sekhandur.

  ‘Do you remember us?’ I asked him. He was already replacing his helm.

  ‘You speak irrelevancies.’

  ‘What happened to you, after you left us? For how many years have you been gone?’

  His helm clicked into place with the crunching of pressure seals. His voice emerged through the vocaliser grille once more, as he told me, of course, that I spoke irrelevancies.

  The bridge shivered with Ultio’s sudden unease. ‘I see another fleet in the dark,’ she said. ‘Approaching at attack speed.’

  I had turned to her when she spoke. When I looked back to Ashur-Kai – to Saronos – he was gone.

  On the hololithic display, the lone Warp Ghosts vessel that had accompanied our fleet, the Tartaran Wraith, was sailing back into the Eye’s murky borders.

  ‘Ashur-Kai…’ I murmured.

  ASHUR-KAI! I hurled his name into the warp, a plea to be answered and a command to be obeyed. There was nothing. Nothing at all.

  Lheor thudded his palm against the back of my head. ‘Forget them! Let them run. The war’s about to start.’

  Words escaped me. It was all I could do to nod.

  We came about to face the new threat: the inbound fleet, its vanguard vessels still mathematically mystifying distances away. Deep-sight images relayed back ship after ship after ship… You must understand that when the Imperium speaks of Chapters, they have sacrificed the apocalyptic but disordered strength of a Legion for a surgical, precise special operations force. The Black Templars were a Chapter, but they were a Chapter on a scale the Imperium has not seen since the halcyon, blood-bitter days of the Heresy.