Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Abaddon laughed as image after image of sable-hulled warships stitched their way across the oculus. With the light of unhealthy mirth in his eyes, he spread his arms wide in a gesture of kingly acknowledgement.

  ‘It seems we are not the only black Legion.’

  When Ultio called out that we were being hailed, the command deck fell into hallowed silence. No one needed to ask which ship was sending the hail.

  The image upon the oculus took several seconds to resolve, and between the distance at hand and the interference of nearby Eyespace, it remained flickering and grainy. The throne before us was fashioned of carved bronze and Terran marble, that blue-veined stone rarer than an honest man in the Nine Legions. Its high back and broad arms were flanked by stands of braziers and ascending candles, painting the white rock amber and casting flickering shadows across the dark warrior seated there.

  Many legionaries and humans alike have mistaken Abaddon for his father, Horus. There was no way that this warrior could be mistaken for his primarch liege. His armour was black, as was ours. The ceramite layers were rimmed in gold, as were ours. It is said that our armour is black to obfuscate our past colours, and this is true, but I saw the very same mournful and hopeful defiance in the wargear of the warrior before me. The stain of failure clung to him as it clung to us, and rather than drape himself in funereal black out of a need for revenge, he had darkened his armour as a statement of atonement and redemption.

  He reclined like an idle king, too stalwart to slouch, too alert to be resting, his hand on the hilt of a black sword. Every one of us knew that blade’s legend. Many of us had lost brothers to its killing edge. Their blood had soaked into its black steel, running across the inscription marking its length. The oculus image was too flawed to read the words but I knew what they would say if the view resolved: Imperator Rex. The blade was forged to honour the Emperor, the king of kings, the Master of Mankind.

  The warrior’s hair was cropped close and whitened by time. A short beard framed the thin, scarred line of his mouth. Age had weathered his skin and frosted his hair, but his shoulders were unbowed, and no oculus distortion could hide the icy fury in his eyes. Vindication burned in that gaze. He had waited for us here, down the many decades, and he had been right to wait.

  He was us, through a lens of loyal zeal, through a mirror of indignant righteousness. I would have known this even before I tasted his knight’s brainflesh months before. I would have known it the second my eyes fell upon him, this ancient knight-king, enthroned on white stone and leaning upon a sword that had reaped an untellable number of lives during our doomed rebellion.

  Abaddon was standing, staring, his glyphed teeth showing through parted lips. He was as awed as the rest of us. Knowing what was waiting once we broke free was one thing, but witnessing it with our own eyes was quite another. A smile dawned across his features, and his warp-lit eyes gleamed.

  ‘Only you, Sigismund,’ he said to the knight-king, ‘would pursue a grudge to the very borders of hell. That’s a hatred so pure, I can’t help but admire it.’

  The ancient knight rose, raising the blade in a warrior’s salute, one I recognised from fighting alongside the Imperial Fists in brighter, better days. He kissed the hilt, then pressed his forehead to the cold blade.

  ‘I suffer not the unclean to live.’

  Abaddon’s grin deepened. ‘Blood of the Gods, it is good to see you again, Sigismund.’

  ‘I uphold the honour of the Emperor. I abhor and destroy the witch. I accept any challenge, no matter the odds.’

  Abaddon was laughing now. ‘A true son of Rogal Dorn. Never show emotion when a chorus of oaths and vows will serve instead.’

  But they were not vows. Not really. They were promises. He wrote those oaths for his Chapter to follow, but they were his words – not vows for his knights to emulate, but a promise to his foes.

  Sigismund, once First Captain of the Imperial Fists, now High Marshal of the Black Templars, looked back at us from the bridge of the Eternal Crusader. And still he refused to address us. We were beneath him, undeserving of anything but his regal disdain.

  In contrast, our bridge erupted with sound. Shouts and murderous cries were hurled towards the oculus, as the relief of escaping our prison and the surreal truth of being confronted by our former foes finally broke over us. It banished the stunned and useless silence that had gripped us upon emerging into the Cadian Gate, and we baptised the moment in an orchestra of bestial roars and jeers. It was a tide of sound from human throats, mutant maws and legionary helm vocalisers, a throat-tearing wave of derision and fury that made the stinking air of the bridge tremble. There was joy in that sound, and bitterness, and rage. It was an exorcism. A purging. It was vindicta given voice.

  Sigismund looked at us as if we were nothing but howling barbarians. To him, perhaps we were. He still had not addressed us directly, and he did not change that now. He gave an order to his bridge crew and cast his cloak from his shoulders, freeing himself for the fight to come.

  ‘Attack.’

  Ultio’s response was immediate. ‘The Eternal Crusader is engaging.’

  She didn’t wait for orders. The Vengeful Spirit shuddered as it moved to match its sister ship. It had been centuries since they sailed the same skies. Now they would meet once more.

  All-out void war is fought in spheres of engagement. The greatest fleets duel one another in a three-dimensional battlescape, with elements of each fleet occupying a spherical space of conflict. Within this sphere they keep their escorts, their fighters and their targets. In this manner, a series of individual battles forms the greater war, no different from the regimental shield walls of the Iron Era or the naval engagements of the Age of Sail.

  How fine that sounds in principle. The reality is altogether messier. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

  The spheres are ever-shifting loci, moving and realigning moment by moment with the unfolding battle. Keeping track of this untrackable miasma, where tens of thousands of lives are lost in every heartbeat and every attack must be made with streams of calculation, is a task for only our finest minds. A gifted void warrior is among a Legion’s most precious resources. Abaddon, for all his skills, has never been a natural in the void. He has always thrived in the instinctual immediacy of a close fight. Valicar Hyne, named as the Black Legion’s fleetmaster by Ezekyle, was one of our savants in this arena.

  But none of our captains, Valicar included, could match the Anamnesis. Ultio was beholden to Abaddon and Valicar’s orders, but they were beholden to her genius. She was the machine-spirit of the flagship – she was the ship itself – and yet she was even more. The Martian Mechanicum had originally constructed her to be the core of my first warship, the now-lost Tlaloc, encrusting her suspension tank with hundreds of mind-linked cogitators and harvested, vat-sustained slave-brains. They remade her into a gestalt entity, naming her the Anamnesis, yet it was only when she fused with the ancient and warlike machine-spirit of our Legion’s flagship that she truly developed autonomy. As the heart of the Vengeful Spirit, she rediscovered mortal instinct and blended it with her cold and calculating mind.

  Ezekyle was the one to name her Ultio, a wry reference to an Old Earth goddess of war and vengeance. And, I am sure it will not surprise you to learn, another word for vindicta.

  With her enhanced senses bonded so closely with the Vengeful Spirit, Ultio had a perception of void war’s oceanic possibilities that even the lords of the Legions could not easily match. She was one of the Mechanicum’s very few successful prototypes in combining human awareness, gestalt consciousness and elevated intelligence within a machine-spirit, and this rarity made her as useful as any of Abaddon’s warlords. Arguably, it made her more useful than any individual within the Ezekarion. More than once I had wondered if Abaddon’s priority had been in acquiring my talents, or if securing my loyalty was merely a necessity towards gaining control of
the Anamnesis. When I had asked him in the past, his reaction had been to break into laughter, which was no answer at all.

  Abaddon was feverish from the moment he heard Sigismund give his order to attack. Despite our breaking free of the Eye, the Pantheon’s singers and heralds cried ever louder for his attention. Strange to think that this was before he wore their mark and ­carried the daemon blade – in years to come, looking upon him as the Despoiler, the Lord of Chaos Ascendant, would be like staring into the heart of a sun.

  Yet the Pantheon cried out for him, louder now that he was one step closer to the destiny they wished for him – a destiny he would both fulfil and deny for the rest of his life as the Gods’ greatest chance of victory and the one man they could never trust or cage. Fire burned in his eyes as he stared at the Eternal Crusader.

  The two fleets powered towards one another, far-sighted weapons firing on the faith of calculations long before a single ship was in visual range. The deck rumbled beneath our feet with the draconic efforts of the engines and the first volleys spat into the calm night. Individual battlegroups followed their assigned vectors, beginning to drift away to form their own engagement spheres. We had only just returned to real space, and already we defiled it with the scream of weapon batteries.

  So began the first battle of the Long War.

  Before the fleets joined, a period of suffocating serenity reigned. I was aware of the crew bracing around me, and of the clarion calls that sent warriors to their battle stations, pilots to their fighters and enslaved gunnery crews to their cannon decks. With the distance between the two armadas, for a time there was nothing to do but wait. I knew where Abaddon would want me to be when the time came, and so I remained on the bridge, awaiting his order.

  My skull ached. It was more than a headache; it was a physical pressure upon the cranial bone that caged my brain. I could feel the blood vessels swelling behind my eyes.

  Nefertari came to me, mellifluous in her alien motions. Her merest movements were all silk with no sensuality. Nagual was with her, almost overshadowing her in height and most definitely in bulk. My two trusted retainers, my two finest weapons, though circumstance had denied me their use in recent years. One, an alien maiden I no longer truly needed; the other, a simple-minded reflection of the wolf I had lost long ago.

  Master, the lynx sent to me. I ignored him. I was watching the slow-growing specks that made up the enemy fleet. My remade fist closed and opened, a bionic bloom that betrayed my restlessness. My new machine knuckles purred.

  ‘You are thinking of Ashur-Kai,’ my eldar bloodward ventured. She was always so certain, her tone always so adamant, that it was strange to hear a query in her voice now.

  ‘Yes and no,’ I confessed. I was thinking of Ashur-Kai – of ­Saronos and the changes I had witnessed – but I was also dwelling on thoughts of Thagus Daravek. I felt us sliding inexorably closer to a final confrontation with the Lord of Hosts, and I no longer believed I could be of any help to Abaddon and my brothers.

  Were they thinking the same? Would they see me as a liability and remove me? How strange it felt, to not be trusted by one’s own kindred. I kept skimming their surface thoughts in search of any unease, but all of them were focused on the coming battle.

  ‘Saronos,’ said Nefertari, seemingly trying out the name’s taste. ‘Was the warrior in grey truly Ashur-Kai?’

  ‘Yes. It was him all along. The dilations of time…’ I began, only for Nefertari to silence me with a curt hiss between her teeth.

  ‘So the White Seer lives, even after he was sacrificed. Why then do you seethe with such unbecoming melancholic unrest?’

  ‘It is not Ashur-Kai that burdens me,’ I admitted. ‘Thagus Daravek said he killed me at Drol Kheir.’

  Nefertari wore hydra gauntlets that day, devices of Commorran design that projected talon-like growths of living crystal, all to the wearer’s whim. My bloodward used the violet crystal fingernail claws to tap out a slow, tinkling melody against the crew railing. It had the cadence of a lullaby, one warped and out of time.

  Her grasp of the various Gothic tongues was masterful, but she struggled with her pronunciation. The eldar mouth and vocal cords were not suited to what Nefertari termed ‘the animal bleating that you humans call language’.

  ‘Drol Kheir,’ she repeated the name. ‘In our time together, allies and enemies alike have spoken of that place.’ Her dark eyes watched the tense forms of the bridge crew as the warships closed the immense distance. The deck beneath us shivered with the distant roar of the Vengeful Spirit’s engines. ‘Rumours of your demise are nothing new. Did you die there? Were his words true?’

  ‘I do not know. It might explain the command he holds over my physical form.’

  ‘It might also be the lie of a desperate monster seeking any advantage he can, as destiny slips through his fingers.’

  ‘My memory of the place is shattered. Flawed.’ Though that could be Daravek’s manipulation as well. This was all so futile. My mind was working itself into knots.

  I will kill him, Nagual assured me. I dismissed the beast’s useless loyalty with a wave of my hand. Nagual had tried and failed in that ambition almost as often as I had.

  ‘Why do so many of your brothers and cousins believe you died in that place?’ Nefertari asked.

  ‘Because I went into seclusion after Drol Kheir. I left the Thousand Sons conclaves still gathered at Sortiarius and sailed with Ashur-Kai, away from the rest of our Legion. We were unseen for decades.’

  ‘Doing what, voscartha?’ she asked, using the Commorran word for ‘slave master’. I hesitated for a moment – she had never before betrayed any interest in my life before her presence within it. I felt the threat of a smile.

  ‘We were seeking a route out of the Eye.’

  She gave a knowing nod as the chronology slipped into place. It had been in that period that we initially came across Nefertari herself, adrift in a riven vessel of alien metal and living crystal. A lifepod of sorts, tumbling through the Eye’s tides, with only one soul aboard.

  She flexed her fingers and the violet crystal talons receded. ‘In my experience,’ Nefertari said in her thick, difficult accent, ‘you mon-keigh make a great many claims when it comes to your own prowess, awarding yourselves title after title, your psyches awash with the hope that such posturing will intimidate your foes.’

  ‘Undeniably true,’ I admitted, ‘though that is harsh criticism from a species that attaches poetic nonsense like “the Storm of Silence” and “the Cry of the Wind” to its demigods, no?’

  ‘You are pronouncing the honorifics with a mumbling ineptitude that renders them meaningless,’ Nefertari pointed out, ‘and it is not remotely the same.’

  If you say so, I thought.

  ‘Indeed,’ I said aloud.

  ‘Perhaps he killed you and bound your spirit,’ Nefertari mused. ‘Perhaps he preys upon your fears. What difference does it make to you in the here and the now?’

  ‘It makes every difference. If he has bound my soul to his will…’ I trailed off, my discomfort growing. This was coming too close to matters I never wished Nefertari to know of – matters pertaining to her own existence. She cut onwards, ignorant to my reluctance.

  ‘You are wrong. It makes no difference at all. If you see him, you must kill him. This is what must be done. It matters not what hold he possesses over you. It changes nothing.’

  ‘My thanks,’ I said, ‘for this unwelcome and cold clarity.’

  Distracted, I ran my bionic hand through Nagual’s fur. The beast tensed, almost flinching back from me in alarm. Nefertari, far too inhuman to betray any real emotion, nevertheless let her glance flick to the motion. She recognised the gesture from the years with Gyre at my side.

  I looked at the great tigrus-cat, meeting the flawed pearls of his eyes. I saw in his gaze how he feared me: he feared dissolution and banishment due to
disappointing his master – as all thrall daemons do – but he feared me, as well. He feared my thoughts. He feared my temper.

  I have not treated you well in our years together, have I, creature?

  The huge lynx scored the deck with his talons.

  You are strong, master, Nagual sent back with an acceptance born of instinct. He would serve me because I was strong, because I had shackled him to my will. He feared me but, for now, he would not defy me. I had expected this simplistic and somewhat hollow perspective, but Nagual surprised me with his next words.

  And I am not Gyre. She alone tasted no torment from you.

  I had never excruciated Gyre. She had never required torture or any other inflicted encouragement. Nor had I ever taken out my temper on her, for my long-serving wolf was a creature of cunning as well as lethality.

  Nagual was all predation and destruction. Perhaps I had undervalued those aspects. It was something to think about when I had the luxury of time. If I rediscovered that luxury.

  I touched my fingertips to my closed eyes, fighting through the miasmic headache still pushing at the insides of my skull. The indistinct haze of images from memories danced in a filter over my sight. The command deck around me was layered with the contours of places I had not been in decades. Brothers long dead stood at the edge of my vision. I could even hear their voices, not quite real, thinned in recollection, yet impossible to banish.

  I was not the only one suffering. Most of the warriors remaining on the bridge radiated an aura of the same pain, and blood ran from the noses and ears of several mutants.

  Tzah’q, one of the beastmen from the Tlaloc, snorted bloody filth from his nasal passages, sending it spattering onto the decking. He served as an overseer on the Vengeful Spirit just as he had on my old ship, and though he was ancient now – his fur whitened and his eyes milky – he needed no eyes to watch over the menials under his less than tender care. Horns of black glass jutted from his temples, and smaller spikes and spines of the same obsidian protruded from his chin and cheeks. He oversaw the menials and thralls, head jerking this way and that. Where furred, clawed hands had once gripped a las­rifle or a whip, now avian talons curled, wickedly sharp, held close to his chest. The Changer had blessed him – or cursed him, if you prefer – but I no longer healed the ravages of his age, for he no longer needed me to. The God of Fate had marked him well.