Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  He huffed again, another short, breathy bark to clear his snout of the bleeding slime. The beastman sensed my scrutiny and bared his yellowing peg-teeth in a bitter rictus.

  ‘Pain,’ he grunted. An acknowledgement, not a complaint. ‘Pain since we left the Eye.’

  Tzah’q had been born in the Eye. He had never lived within the material universe. The weight of physics played upon all of us once more, but it was heaviest on those who were strangers to reality.

  ‘It is time,’ I replied.

  ‘Time, Lord Khayon?’

  ‘The pain you feel is time going forwards. You are feeling the weight of your bones and the running of your blood as your body ages around you. What you feel, Tzah’q, is the passage of time. That is why your mind aches.’

  ‘Pain,’ the beastman agreed. I did not care enough to read his mind to see whether he understood or not. It hardly mattered.

  ‘Khayon,’ Abaddon called to me. I left my thralls and ascended my lord’s dais, ready to receive my orders at last.

  When I say that he looked fevered, I am not doing justice to what burned in his gaze. You might call it a sick hunger or the purity of zeal, and both descriptions would be perfectly apt. What I saw in his eyes was a silent furore, a riot of restrained emotion. If he were a beast, I thought, he would be salivating.

  Moriana was with him. She regarded me coolly. I ignored her.

  ‘I can scarcely give it credence,’ Abaddon said quietly. ‘Free, at long last.’

  ‘Free,’ I agreed. ‘But for how long?’

  He gave a toothy smile, knowing of what I spoke. The Imperium would hear of this battle soon enough. We were a Legion, but our enemies would descend upon us with the strength of an empire.

  ‘Long enough, my brother. Long enough. You know what I wish of you?’

  ‘As always.’ Closer to him, I could hear it now – the rippling song of the warp, spreading through his aura like blood misting through water. And within that shrieking harmony, words – words in a tongue that defied comprehension despite the many decades I had spent immersed in the warp’s sacrilegious melodies. It was a song shaped for Abaddon alone, as the Pantheon crooned to him of fate and destiny. I wondered just what they were promising, and whether Moriana had whispered those same promises in my lord’s ears.

  One word permeated that siren howl, one word that was imprinting itself upon Abaddon’s very bones and transcribing itself through his bloodstream. The only word I recognised.

  ‘Drach’nyen,’ I said aloud. ‘I hear its song clearer out here.’

  ‘As do I,’ said Abaddon. Moriana stiffened at our words.

  ‘Now is not the time for your suspicions, Iskandar.’ She rested her small, bare, human hand on the Talon of Horus. I was gratified by the caress of distrust in Abaddon’s aura – no matter how he heeded her words, he was under no illusions. He seemed on the verge of saying more, but instead he shifted away from the slender prophetess and nodded to the oculus.

  ‘Are you prepared for this, Khayon?’

  Was that a second’s doubt in his eyes? A momentary flicker of indecision?

  I looked at the fleet bearing down upon us, and as vast as it was, it was no match for us in size. At the fleet’s vanguard sailed the ­Eternal Crusader, and once more I saw the ancient knight in my mind’s eye, so regal upon his throne.

  ‘I do not think anyone can be prepared to fight Sigismund,’ I replied.

  ‘The Emperor’s Champion,’ Abaddon said quietly. This was the title that Lord Rogal Dorn had granted to his son at the Battle of Terra. And oh, how Sigismund had earned that title. ‘You saw how old he is.’

  ‘If you are trying to convince me that he will have lost his prowess, Ezekyle, you are walking a foolish road.’

  ‘Perhaps so. He is the embodiment of all we are fighting against. He is ignorance incarnate, a puppet held up by strings of blind loyalty to the deceiving Emperor. But I can’t hate him. Is that not insane, Khayon? There stands the avatar of all we seek to destroy – an Imperial legend – and yet I admire the man.’

  ‘Admire the man,’ I said. ‘Destroy the legend.’

  He grinned. ‘Wise words.’

  ‘Take me with you,’ I added. ‘I want to fight in the boarding assault.’

  ‘Why?’ Abaddon replied at once. His amusement faded at my break with tradition. One of the Ezekarion had to remain aboard the flagship, to command Delvarus and to work with Ultio. It was the way of things. Without Ashur-Kai, I was the logical choice to remain, given my bond with the Anamnesis and my talents in guiding the Secondborn that served under Delvarus.

  ‘Delvarus and the Riven can hold the Vengeful Spirit without me, and the ashen dead will answer to other sorcerers. I want to be part of the assault aboard the Eternal Crusader.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked again, as if he did not know. He merely wanted me to say it.

  ‘To fight at your side. To have you prove, after Daravek’s claims, that you still trust me.’

  The Talon’s claws clashed softly together. ‘If I didn’t trust you, you’d be dead.’

  I reached for his mind to prevent the prophetess from hearing. Is that true, brother? You do not trust Moriana, yet she still draws breath.

  He closed our psychic link with a pulse of dismissal. ‘I need you here, Khayon.’

  I heard the iron in his words. There would be no argument. I conceded with a nod, feeling every eye in the chamber turned to me, witnessing Abaddon’s refusal. On one level I knew this was nothing but imagination born of bruised pride, yet still I felt those stares.

  ‘Lheor will remain with you,’ Abaddon decided. Ever the battle-king, he burned with vitality at the thought of boarding the Eternal ­Crusader. I could practically hear his racing pulse. ‘And if you lose my ship, I may lose my temper.’

  With those words, he left the bridge, trailed by Falkus and the black-clad Terminators of Abaddon’s elite guard – once the ­Justaerin, now the Aphotic Blade.

  I did not watch him leave. I focused my annoyance upon the oculus, where the two fleets sailed ever closer. The foe’s spheres of engagement were falling into place as subfleets and battlegroups aligned in their individual formations. The deck shuddered as we veered ponderously aside from the first torpedo runs, the crew stations erupting in shouts and declarations of sensory data.

  It was beginning now. Truly beginning.

  ‘Sister,’ Ultio called to the Eternal Crusader, the Vengeful Spirit’s sibling and the only Gloriana-class battleship in the enemy armada. On her face was an expression of consummate rapture. ‘You missed.’

  The bridge doors rumbled closed behind Abaddon and the Black Legion elite. The Vengeful Spirit, already juddering with the overburn of its engines, somehow sped up in unity with the Anamnesis’ bloodlust.

  Void War

  I have spoken of our fleet’s might, but not its poverty. The many daemon-forges that would later answer Abaddon’s calls were still in their infancy within the Empire of the Eye. Our Heresy-era technology was eternally degrading even back then, and we had little to use in place of our losses. Resources like ore-rich moons, shipboard foundries and Mechanicum manufactoria were as precious to us as fresh water: not only agonisingly rare, but also subject to their own sufferings. Legion warbands endlessly plundered such sites in the rabid hunt for shreds and scraps of advantage.

  You have heard evidence of this carrion-feeding already. I have told you of Maeleum, of the raids and punishments it endured and of our undignified picking through its carcass. We were all vultures and carrion crows in those days. I believe we still are.

  And if we were low on ammunition, if our armour plating was cracked, repaired and cracked again, the truth is that our fleets were in even worse shape. We had been beaten in the Heresy, we had been beaten into exile in the Scouring, and while the Imperium licked its wounds in the aftermath of our disappearance, we
had spent that era waging war against one another.

  For every vessel enhanced by mutation, another was cursed by it; for every cruiser sailing with admirable repairs or an ­undamaged hull, another was a shell of its former glory. Within Eyespace, our ships were subject to the erosion of the warp’s touch, accelerating natural degradation, and reliable opportunities to dry-dock and repair a capital ship were staggeringly scarce. In the Eye, especially in that era, a functioning, stable shipyard was practically the stuff of dreams. They were always the highest priority for destruction if another warband wished to grind a rival into dust.

  For a time, the newborn Black Legion had claimed and defended Niobia Halo – the shipyard and forge moon belonging to Ceraxia and Valicar. That custodianship had ended when Thagus Daravek led a warhost of Word Bearers and Death Guard to annihilate our docks and plunder the riches we had acquired. The installation was lost in the resulting battle. Afterwards, both Valicar and Ceraxia joined the Ezekarion as fleetmaster and armsmistress respectively.

  Many of the vessels we sailed from the Eye into the waiting fire arcs of the Black Templars fleet bore the wounds of ages. The pressures of the storm that had barred our escape only added to the strains already placed on their hulls after centuries of civil war and sailing in the unquiet, poisoned tides of Eyespace. Imperial captains across the millennia often observe that the Traitor Legions and our thrall fleets are comprised of warships plundered from sectors surrounding the Eye. The Gothic Sector alone has supplied us with any number of ships across the many centuries. This is a sad necessity, as our ­Crusade- and Heresy-era vessels break down beyond sustainability, are lost to the warp’s clutches or are simply destroyed in the ebb and flow of the Long War.

  It is for these same reasons that you see our individual warriors equipped with ancient and unreliable patterns of weaponry, or reduced to using inefficient, outdated wargear. For all the strength that mutation and hatred bestow, erosion, decay and the eternal civil war between the Nine Legions takes more than its share.

  We are mighty, but it is a tenuous might. Just as that day, when we outnumbered Sigismund’s armada, our advantage was fragile. We did not have the luxury of carelessness. A great deal of our fleet’s strength was concentrated in the killing power and endurance of the Vengeful Spirit and the other largest ships that once sailed at the vanguard of the Great Crusade. Most were changed significantly by their time in the Eye, and I knew their machine-spirit cores would be as disorientated by their return to real space as any truly living being.

  I have no gift for void war. I have never been able to overcome the helplessness of being a witness to such grand destruction, with my fate entirely cradled by the vessel around me. Worst of all, void battle is not swift. Despite the fact thousands of men and women are dying with every passing second, the war itself plays out with unbearable traction.

  I remained on the command deck as the battle began. The ­Eternal Crusader and the Vengeful Spirit powered towards one another, but they were not the first vessels to engage. That ­honour fell to the ­Tyresian’s Hex, a light cruiser that sped ahead of its engagement sphere, immediately finding itself pockmarked with gas-venting wounds as an Imperial fighter wing clung to its skin like a haze of circling insects.

  More of our vessels tore free of their formations, streaking ahead at the whims of bloodthirsty captains who were spurred on by the long-denied taste of vengeance. I shook my head at the sight, only for Lheorvine to snort at my disappointment. He was at my side upon the throne’s elevated dais, watching the same images on the oculus. He sympathised with the warships falling out of formation to risk their own revenge.

  ‘Undisciplined,’ I said.

  ‘Not everyone is a cold-blooded Tizcan,’ he grunted back. His cranial implants were biting; one of his eyes kept twitching closed, and he had to suck saliva back through his metal teeth.

  ‘We are soldiers,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Soldiers.’ He made an insult of the word. ‘Once we were crusaders, Khayon, and now we are warriors, but we were never “soldiers”. Keep that foolishness to yourself.’

  I swallowed my argument, following his train of thought. It was not the first time legionaries have disagreed over those semantics, and it would be far from the last. Some believed soldiering came down to discipline, or fighting for a state or a leader rather than for yourself. Some believed warriorhood was a matter of heart that elevated them above a soldier’s station, while others considered it a state of barbarity that dragged them beneath it.

  Some questions have no answers.

  No matter how seriously we took warfare, no matter how adamantly we clung to our disciplined roots as a Space Marine Legion, many of our number were ultimately the raiders and marauders that time had made them. For better or worse, we would never have the ironclad discipline of a Throne-loyal Adeptus Astartes force. Even back then, we had lost much of the discipline we had once possessed as Legions of the Great Crusade.

  ‘No argument?’ Lheor grinned. ‘Where is Khayon and what have you done with him?’

  ‘I am in no mood for your jests.’

  ‘Are you ever?’

  ‘Please be quiet, Lheor.’

  The ship shivered as the first lance strikes came close enough to caress it, and our void shields lit in reaction, brought into shimmering being. In her containment chamber-tank, Ultio pushed her hands forwards through the fluid. Her face was set in savage concentration.

  As was mine. Ultio lived the battle as it unfolded, but I was limited to merely watching it, trying to follow its course through the inefficient vista of flickering hololithics and an oculus plagued by static.

  The Eternal Crusader powered ever closer. The Vengeful Spirit felt tight around me, its every deck plate and hull wall taut with Ultio’s excited fury. She wanted nothing more than to claw her sister ship to pieces with lance and broadside. From the viciousness writ upon her face, I thought she might even be tempted to ram the other vessel in her rage.

  The ship gave a tremendous shudder beneath another barrage. The lights sputtered across the chamber.

  ‘That was no lance strike,’ I said.

  ‘Look.’ Lheor drew my attention back to the oculus. ‘That’s not good.’

  Three vessels sailed in an elevated engagement sphere at a stand-off distance, too far from the wrath of our guns unless we broke off from the Eternal Crusader. Their delineation runes marked them as vessels unfamiliar to the Vengeful Spirit’s memory banks – Crusade-era Victory-class cruisers belonging to no Legion. I watched as the rearmost of the three daggerish vessels, thick with the flies of its lesser escorts, trembled in the void as it fired a city’s worth of ship-wide stabilisers.

  The impact struck us even before the ship’s prow-mounted accelerator coils had flashed with their release. The Vengeful Spirit heaved around us, metal groaning under tension, bruises discolouring Ultio’s dusky skin.

  She gave a snarl that had no place emerging from a human throat.

  Lheor grunted as the ship stabilised. ‘Shieldbreakers,’ he said.

  ‘Sailing with minimal escorts,’ I replied. ‘That is bait if ever I saw it.’

  ‘Sure enough, but it’s one hell of an opportunity.’ He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘What’s more important here? Killing Sigismund or claiming resources for the Long War?’

  He had a point, and I was of a mind to encourage his rare tactfulness. I opened a vox-link to Abaddon, where he waited in his boarding claw. ‘Ezekyle…’

  ‘We felt it,’ his voice crackled back, marred by interference. ‘Nova cannon.’ He paused, doubtless reviewing the data from within his helm’s tactical feeds, calculating how much damage they could inflict upon us before we reached the Eternal Crusader. If the imagery suffered battle interference up here on the bridge, it was likely little more than a spread of distortion across a helmet’s retinal feed.

  ‘Proceed as pla
nned,’ Abaddon decided, as we had all known he would. ‘Our escorts will catch up after we engage. We’ll hold a quarter of their fleet alone if we have to.’

  ‘We can chase the cruisers down,’ I argued. ‘We can silence those long guns for good.’ There was logic to this. Nova cannons require an immense sacrifice in time and effort to prepare, fire and reload, and were near worthless at close range. With Abaddon’s order, we could tear through those three Victory cruisers like a mythical Terran lion ravaging through a helpless herd of extinct Terran elk. ‘Should we not board them and claim them for ourselves? Think of the value of such prizes.’

  ‘Don’t be tempted by lesser prey, sorcerer. It’s a juicy ruse to lure the alpha predator away. They know if we go for their throat, we win almost at once, so they offer up tempting targets to test our resolve.’

  ‘The Vengeful Spirit is our greatest game piece on this board,’ I replied to Abaddon. ‘Let us win the war first, then you can face Sigismund.’

  ‘I will have his head,’ Abaddon snapped. His famous temper kindled at the threat of being denied close-quarters slaughter. I could practically sense him trying to wrest it back under control. ‘Whatever they attempt is meaningless once we’re aboard the ­Crusader, and nothing they can do will stop us boarding it. Ignore the ripe targets they lay in our path. Proceed as planned.’

  I tried one final time. ‘We are here to raid, Ezekyle. We are here to gather our strength, not deplete it. We should take those ships for ourselves.’

  Abaddon’s reply was a static-laden dismissal. ‘Valicar is fleetmaster. Let him take them or kill them as he sees fit. I want Sigismund, Khayon. I feel the hand of fate on my shoulder. This must be done.’