There would be no arguing with him. Every syllable that left his fanged mouth seethed with vindicta – our greatest strength and our deepest flaw, embodied by Ezekyle, who has always been the best of us. I wondered how much of his eagerness was a desire for vengeance and glory, and how much was desperation to prove himself against the Legiones Astartes hero that had taken his place as first-favoured. Any warrior of the Nine Legions that says he fights without bitterness is lying.
There was more, and it was not tied into our gene-forged bodies or the preternatural depths of our bitterness. Abaddon was driven by a hunger far more mundane; warriors throughout history have always defined themselves by having the courage to face their enemies, and by the quality of the foes that fall before them. Of course Abaddon wanted Sigismund dead.
I spared a look at Moriana, who stood by Abaddon’s empty throne. She could not overhear my conversation, for she lacked access to the vox, but she still smiled when she saw me take note of her.
I said nothing to Ezekyle. There was nothing to say. The link went dead, immediately punctuated by the rattling shake of the ship around us once more. Nova cannon projectiles, hurled by circular racks of gravitic impellers and accelerator spirals, detonated in plasmic cloudbursts the size of celestial bodies. The Vengeful Spirit tore through the detonation’s savage aftermath, increasingly alone as our escorts fell ever further behind. Initially, we had been at risk of outpacing them with Ultio’s aggressive charge, but now they were truly forced back: we could survive a sustained nova cannon barrage; they could not.
‘We are about to be dangerously alone,’ I said to no one but myself.
Moriana’s smile was an unreadable crescent; it could have been sincere or vicious, I could not tell.
‘Have faith, Iskandar,’ she said. ‘Trust in Ezekyle. Destiny rides at his side this day, and the Gods are bearing witness to his deeds. These are his first steps to becoming the vessel into which the Pantheon pours all of its promises.’
I sneered at the sentiment. ‘I trust Ezekyle completely, prophetess. It is your Gods that I mistrust and despise. My lady, if you believe Abaddon will ever become their vessel, you have gravely misjudged the man you admire.’
‘Time changes all things, Iskandar. Ezekyle is a soul of singular vision.’
‘Your serene smugness makes my gorge rise,’ I told her with exaggerated politeness, ‘and I am telling you, Moriana, you did not see the expression he wore when he rammed the Talon through his reborn father’s body. Abaddon is everything Horus is not. Your Gods may plague us. Some of us may even pray to them in times of dire need. But the son will never fall into the duped slavery that held his father in thrall. The sooner you see that, the sooner you will see why we follow him.’
She laughed aloud as the deck shivered around us. ‘How confidently you speak of the future! Are you a seer now?’
‘I am a man who knows his brother.’ She paled at the force of my tone, perhaps suspecting she had pushed me too far.
Nefertari and Nagual drew near, the huntress playfully regarding her crystal claws, the great cat giving a low, burbling growl. I had not summoned them, yet they had read my mood perfectly.
‘Remove this civilian from the bridge,’ I ordered them.
For the very first time, Moriana looked hesitant as the daemon-cat and the winged alien regarded her with cold gazes.
‘I am Ezekarion,’ she said, and I could not help but laugh.
‘That means Ezekyle is sworn to heed your counsel,’ I replied. ‘And it means I will not kill you, Moriana. It does not mean I want you on the command deck in the midst of a battle.’
‘I’m staying here, Khayon. Your slaves won’t harm me.’
‘I say again, I am pledged not to kill you. I said nothing about not harming you. If I crushed your spine and plucked your eyes from your face, you could still mewl your prophecies to Abaddon.’
She swallowed, believing me and finally falling silent.
‘Nagual, Nefertari, take her away. Guard her somewhere that any boarding parties will not be able to reach.’
Nefertari narrowed her slanted, alien eyes. ‘It is time to leave, mon-keigh god-whisperer.’ Nagual reinforced her words with a snarl.
Moriana backed away, dignified in defeat, though I could hear the rhythm of her quickened heartbeat as she retreated. When the three of them had left the bridge, Lheor approached me once more. I had the sudden and disquieting notion that he had retreated from Moriana’s presence, hiding from her.
‘She makes my teeth itch,’ Lheor said quietly. His eyes were glassy and unfocused. ‘I can’t decide why.’
‘I know why,’ I ventured.
‘You do?’ Some of the caution bled from his gaze now she was gone.
‘It is because she speaks like a primarch. Everything she says is wreathed in certainty and inevitability and dripping with righteous invincibility – the same deluded cries of our failed fathers. My patience for that kind of preaching ran out around the time we were fleeing from Terra with our tails between our legs.’
Lheor showed his metal teeth in a grin. Some were bronze in colour, some a dull silver. He replaced them periodically. I had never thought to ask what they were really made from.
‘She does talk like a primarch,’ he agreed. ‘Though she drools less than Angron ever did, I’ll give her that.’
Ultio thrashed in her suspension tank, her mouth silently wide, lips peeled back from her teeth. The choir of vox-gargoyles and drifting servo-skulls gave voice to her scream, loud enough to set the beastmen braying in worship.
In response to her feral shriek, the Vengeful Spirit heaved into a heavy roll, ramming its way through an ocean of streaming torpedoes. They were pinpricks against the Anamnesis’ skin, the buzzing of worthless vermin.
Blood, she mouthed, and ‘Blood,’ her gargoyles hissed above us. ‘Blood crystals in the bare void and twisted iron turned to melted slag and bursting bodies and decompression gasps and charred steel and rancid chemical fire and…’
On and on she spat the hissing curses, caught in a trance, staring at the Eternal Crusader. The beastmen shouted prayers and devotional braying to their entombed goddess, the heart and soul of the ship, loud enough to set the air shivering.
On the oculus, the black lance of our sister ship speared ever closer.
It is difficult to describe the Vengeful Spirit in battle without straying into theatricality, because a simple retelling of its deeds defies both reason and physics. You must bear witness to it fighting in order to believe what she is capable of.
Even before the Anamnesis was installed as the flagship’s machine-spirit, reports from the Horus Heresy listed the vessel as performing manoeuvres of impossible agility and unleashing weapons of unknown, unnatural origin. These reports, while true, were just the beginning. The Eye changed the Vengeful Spirit in ways that went beyond the crenellations and bastions along its back and the dark goddess at its heart. Existence inside the Eye had bred insanity and lethality into its iron bones.
We tore past the Eternal Crusader that night, close enough that our void shields shrieked with contact discharge against theirs. Voices immediately overlapped as they shouted status updates. Shield strength reports were bellowed across the chamber. Three of the beastmen crew roared that the boarding pods had been fired from their housings. A fighter escort wing had already spat free from their launch bays, tasked with shooting down any missiles tracking our boarding claws; the pilots’ chatter spilled across the vox as they flew and fought and died. Weaponmasters and gunnery overseers bawled orders into their consoles as the oculus filled with the Eternal Crusader’s shield-lit spinal castles.
Voices, voices, voices. Sirens, fire, thunder. Shrieks, detonations, death.
It sounded like Prospero. It sounded like Prospero burning under the Wolf King’s rage.
And then we were past them. We dived th
rough a loose phalanx of the Eternal Crusader’s escorts, our guns silent, every cannon and turret across the ship holding its breath. Projectiles still rained and burst against our shields, but we lanced onwards without firing back.
Ultio was the reason why. She silenced the thousands of cannons slaved to her will, and her worshipful crew obeyed. She rolled in her suspension tank, arching her back, every muscle in her body taut, sinews standing out on her flesh with almost emaciated ferocity. Her jaw was clenched hard enough to risk shattering her teeth. Her eyes, the same dark shade as my own, were rolled to show bare whites.
The ship heaved around us, gravity generators straining to keep pace with the speed of our turn. Weighted air slammed many of us from our feet; I remained standing by locking my boots to the deck.
On the oculus, the Eternal Crusader was beginning to lean into a hard turn, one that would still take a minute or more to complete. The Vengeful Spirit, without slowing an iota, pulled up, inverting its pitch at full speed, rolling to face the way it had come. At the moment we aligned with the Eternal Crusader dead ahead, the engines roared even hotter.
Physics disallows such a manoeuvre at such speed, but it took place in the span of my twin hearts beating no more than ten times.
The Eternal Crusader was still in the first motions of its turn. The Anamnesis raked at its image with her clawed hands, and lance fire streamed silver-white from the Vengeful Spirit’s prow. Torpedoes flew behind those glittering beams. A city-killing’s worth of incendiary rage caught the Eternal Crusader unprepared, spreading migraine prism-light across its suffering void shields, then bursting them to rain fire upon its unprotected hull.
‘The Crusader’s shields are down and Lord Abaddon is aboard her,’ Ultio voxed to the fleet. ‘Cripple her, but remember – she is mine to kill once this is over.’
The Anamnesis leaned the Vengeful Spirit into a more conventional roll, coming about to face the closest Black Templars ships. There was a deathly light in her eyes – she wore the expression of a child learning it can inflict pain on helpless insects, burning them with sunlight through a focusing lens and pulling off their legs and wings.
And that is when the true fight began.
The Eagle of Old Earth was a destroyer, aligning itself into an attack run before we had fully come about. Its weapon batteries banged into the void, spreading impacts across our shields – and there it should have ceased, using its speed and manoeuvrability to escape. Instead it lingered for a second volley, its captain likely buying time for the Eternal Crusader to finish its own course changes. But Ultio was done with her sister ship; that was Abaddon’s prey now. The Anamnesis had a fleet to kill.
The Eagle of Old Earth’s shields lasted all of seven seconds beneath our broadsides as we cut past. The cityscape of Hecutor macrocannons along our port side screamed their sunfire against the Eagle of Old Earth’s naked hull, annihilating the smaller ship in a supernova of bursting plasma. Ultio did not even react. She was already focused on the vessels ahead, above, below – the Black Templars had our flagship isolated and were closing in for the kill. The ship shook endlessly around us, gravity fading or pressing down upon us with punishing force as a consequence of Ultio’s movements.
Lheor, his features twitching with the bite of his cranial implants, worked from a handheld hololith projector, studying a flickering layout of the flagship. Red runic markers denoted the estimated position of Black Templars boarding teams. I tuned out his words as he conveyed information and orders across the vox, keeping Delvarus and his Riven squad leaders appraised of the intruders’ locations.
‘Fewer than I’d have expected,’ he said to me.
We both knew why. The bulk of their strength was still aboard the Eternal Crusader, luring Abaddon and our inner circle into their territory.
‘More than enough to keep Delvarus entertained,’ I replied with a calm that I did not entirely feel. And to slaughter several hundred mortal crew, I thought, though I kept the words from Lheor’s mind, not wishing to inflame the pain engine in his brain and distract him from his task.
He spoke into the squad-relay vox for another few seconds, then regarded me with twitching eyes. ‘This is woeful and bloodless, brother. We should be down there fighting with Delvarus.’
‘Or aboard the Crusader.’
‘Or there,’ he agreed.
I tuned into Delvarus’ vox-feeds, only to be met with raucous screaming, howling, jagged laughter and leonine roars. Bolters crashed in the background. Wherever Delvarus was, he was reaping his share of lives.
The Riven was Delvarus’ warband, a host of Secondborn I had helped create over time, binding daemons within mortally wounded warriors and, whenever the chance arose, prisoners we took in battle. In later years, Imperial forces have encountered Black Legion squads wearing the daemonically tainted armour of loyalist Chapters, as I – and my apprentices – have bound Neverborn into our captives. Before my journey to Terra and my surrender to the Inquisition’s care, I kept a coterie of such bodyguards myself: Blood Angels, Ultramarines, Imperial Fists and several of their Successors, their souls shattered and subsumed by the presence of the daemons riding their husks. It makes for a delicious insult on the battlefield. In those early days, however, Delvarus’ warband were largely comprised of sacrificial volunteers from the Sons of Horus and the World Eaters, as well as prisoners from the other Legions.
‘The Riven are enjoying themselves,’ Lheor muttered. He was rocking slightly now, unable to keep still, suffering from an erratic, adrenal energy he could do nothing to discharge. I would have told him to join the fighting, but he would have refused me. He was a warleader, an officer and a lord in the Legion, and his place was coordinating his brethren. He would do his duty no matter how much he craved to shed blood in its place.
Ultio sailed us through an ocean of enemy firing solutions, treating the ship around her like a steed to be reined to her will and coaxed to give evermore speed. She acknowledged every one of our foes in a descending list of priorities, one that shifted moment by moment based on threat calculations of armament, support and positioning. Her attention was absolute – she chased her prey one after the other with meticulous precision, inflicting enough damage to sunder shields and cripple or kill before immediately refocusing on another target.
The heavy cruiser Adamantine sought to bar our path and block us within a crossfire of several vessels. The Vengeful Spirit banked into a roll like a bullet leaving a rifle, our port and starboard broadsides fireworking into the conflicted night, discharging at the vessels around us as we twisted and dived towards the Adamantine.
Our prow batteries were lances and grativon pulsar arrays. The former ruptured the Adamantine’s shields in a disintegration of shredding light, before the latter crushed the warship’s forward decks in a mangling compression of molecules. Its bridge was among those decks that collapsed beneath this manipulation of its mass, and Ultio torpedoed the still-sailing wreckage to send it spinning aside.
It was not quite enough. Ultio finished the execution up close – the Vengeful Spirit rammed the headless cruiser aside, savaging it with a second graviton volley that collapsed another immense section of its superstructure. Within a heartbeat she was rolling us again, chasing another foe.
I could take it no more, this realm of thunder and shaking walls. I closed my eyes and reached out, seeking a battle I could contribute to.
I found Amurael almost at once. I rode within my brother’s mind as his assault team made its way through the Eternal Crusader. I could not be with them in the flesh, so I journeyed with them in spirit.
As I sank into Amurael’s senses, an unwelcome familiarity gripped me. I had been aboard the Eternal Crusader twice before, both times as an ambassador to the Imperial Fists in shared theatres of war. How strange it felt to enter those halls not with curiosity and respect, making overtures to another Legion in the Great Crusade, but with blade
s in our hands and hate in our hearts.
I clung to Amurael’s thoughts. He felt me there and did not resist, though I would not exactly call it a welcome, either.
Through his senses, I experienced the battle. The air clattered with the metallic coughing of boltguns and the shrieking beams of the few volkite weapons we possessed that still functioned. Each breath I drew was spiced with the fyceline stink of shell propellant or the scorched ozone of steaming metal. Amurael’s warriors comprised a ravening horde – squad by squad they massacred their way through the Eternal Crusader, butchering even unarmed mortal crew, wasting precious ammunition as if we possessed an abundance of such riches. All caution was cast aside. Our men could not be reined in now, even if we had wanted to do so.
The Black Templars met rage with wrath, charging down corridors to crash against the advancing, disorderly tides that had invaded their domain. Again and again, we were locked against shield walls of ceramite plate, where vision thinned to the motions of flashing blades and rattling chains.
We bled. We sheeted with sweat. We swore. Fists and pistol grips pounded against helmets. Chainblades carved their whining way through armour joints or sprayed useless sparks against reinforced plate. Amurael needed room to swing his sword – in close quarters, a warrior needs a shorter, thrusting blade, not a duellist’s longsword – and many were the times Amurael’s blade was fouled by a poor angle or snarled in a Templar’s body, struggling to withdraw after a killing blow. The warriors we faced ground against us in an unceasing horde, sounding out battle cries and oaths to the Emperor, roaring into our faces. Those behind us, our own brothers, howled in frustration, unable to reach through the tight ranks to kill the foes they had waited centuries to face again.
Blood misted the air. Tabards and robes ignited under flamer gouts and spraying sparks. Every heartbeat was punctuated by another crumpling crack of a bolt shell detonating inside a body. We killed blindly in that press of arcing weapons and flashing limbs.
Black Legion Page 24
