Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  But seeing him stripped of battleplate and pretension alike, the similarity between dead father and living son was nothing short of revelatory. I finally gave voice to a question many had considered, yet none had dared ask.

  ‘Are you Horus?’

  His golden eyes glinted with amusement. He dragged in a slow breath through his rebreather.

  ‘I am Ezekyle Abaddon,’ he said through the medicae tank’s speakers.

  ‘That is not what I meant.’ I shook my head and gestured to him: this immense figure in the suspension tank, with slabs of muscle over muscle and a demigod-like stature that had led to this ­legend being whispered throughout the Nine Legions, a legend that would one day be whispered across the galaxy. ‘Are you Horus? Are you his clone? His… son?’

  He laughed, the sound wet and tinny over the speakers. ‘What do you believe, Khayon? Do you think I am?’

  I saw no reason to lie. ‘Yes.’

  This delighted him. I was not sure why.

  ‘And if I were, brother – if I were merely Horus remade, recrafted, with a twist in my gene-code here and an alteration there, would it change anything?’

  I had to think about that. I looked into his eyes but saw no answers there, only amusement.

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps you have always been a genetic twin of your primarch. Or perhaps Ezekyle Abaddon was slain in his pilgrimage across the Eye, and you are one of Fabius’ creations in his place. How am I to know?’

  This, too, delighted him.

  ‘So yet again we come back to trust, my brother.’

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘Let me ask you this, Khayon. What does it matter? Clones, sons, fathers… Let the herd whisper whatever truths they choose. Our eyes are set on worthier goals. We look to the future, not the past.’

  I acceded with a nod, knowing that there was no answer to be had here. Knowing, ultimately, that he was right. It did not matter.

  At least, not if he was on our side.

  ‘You spoke of an opportunity,’ I prompted.

  ‘You did the right thing,’ he countered. I flinched, taken by surprise. ‘You were right to scatter the fleet, brother.’

  ‘I know. But it is gratifying nevertheless to hear you agree with my actions.’

  ‘And you slaughtered Thagus Daravek. Did I not tell you that you could?’ He shifted in the suspension fluid, his eyes wild and bright. ‘And was it not, as ever, a matter of vindicta?’

  ‘It was,’ I conceded.

  ‘Between our freedom and Daravek’s death,’ he began, and his gaze turned fierce, shining with ambition, ‘opportunity dawns like never before. The Templars will return, and they won’t be alone. They’ll bring the wrath of the Imperium at their backs. And what will they find?’

  ‘Is this question rhetorical?’

  ‘Humour me, my assassin, humour me.’

  ‘They will find worlds aflame. Outposts destroyed. Fleetyards raided. Shipping lanes plundered.’

  ‘All true. But they will find raiders and reavers performing those acts. Scattered warbands and isolated warlords. Not an army. Not the Nine Legions.’

  I saw where he was leading, now. ‘And with Daravek dead…’

  ‘There has never been a finer time to unify the Legions in the hatred we share. Once we have unified the Black Fleet, we will bring the warbands of the other Legions to heel through temporary alliances and offers of mutual warfare. Some will betray us. Some will reject us. But we need unity now, Khayon. Let us rise above petty piracy and wage open war once more.’

  It sounded grand, and it was the perfect truth. But it was not the truth entire.

  A silken thread, too fine for an unaugmented human eye to make out, lay on the deck. It was approximately a metre long, the shade of a dead tree under an overcast sky.

  A hair. A hair to match the faint scent of Abaddon’s previous visitor.

  I wondered how long ago Moriana had been here. I did not need to wonder what she had said.

  ‘Open war in the segmentum,’ I dared to say, ‘will also serve your other purpose.’ It was not a question, nor did he insult me by feigning ignorance.

  ‘Drach’nyen calls, Khayon. That weapon will be mine.’

  Nefertari had protected Moriana throughout the boarding actions. I would, in time, come to regret giving her that order, and regret how well she had obeyed it.

  But I did not yet know what a curse the blade would become, nor the madnesses that its black spirit would whisper into all of our minds. Even if I had known then, would I have argued? Abaddon would never have listened. Ambition is ever his closest brother, closer even than the Ezekarion.

  ‘Tell me something,’ I said, ‘before I leave.’

  ‘Speak.’

  ‘Sigismund. How did he wound you?’

  Abaddon fell silent, the vicious vitality of ambition bleeding away. The black rebreather covered much of his face and the murk occluded some of his expression, but I believe for the very first time I saw something like shame flicker across my lord’s face.

  How curious.

  ‘He wouldn’t die,’ Abaddon said at last, thoughtful and low. ‘He just wouldn’t die.’

  I did not need to skim his mind for insight. Just from his tone, I knew what had happened. ‘He baited you. You were lost to rage.’

  I saw the muscles of Abaddon’s jaw and throat clench as he ground his teeth. ‘It was over before I knew he had struck me. I couldn’t breathe. I felt no pain, but I couldn’t breathe. The Black Sword was buried to the hilt, like the old man had sheathed it inside my chest.’

  Ezekyle’s voice was soft across the speakers, cushioned by the bitterness and fascination of reflection. His words were almost staccato whispers, each one a drop of acid on bare flesh. ‘The only way to kill me was to welcome his own death, and he did it the moment the chance arose. We were face to face like that, with his blade through my body. My armour sparked. It failed. I lashed back. His blood soaked the Talon. He fell.’

  I remained quiet, letting Abaddon’s tale unspool. His eyes were looking through me, not seeing what was, but what had been.

  ‘He wasn’t dead, Khayon. He was on the floor, sprawled like a corpse, disembowelled and torn in two, but he still lived. I was on my knees, forcing my dead lungs to keep breathing, kneeling over him like an Apothecary. The Black Sword was still through me. Our eyes met. He spoke.’

  I did not ask Abaddon to tell me. I reached into his thoughts then, tentatively at first in case he rebuffed my presence.

  Then I closed my eyes, and I saw.

  The Black Knight, fallen and ripped apart. His Sword Brethren gone or dead, I did not know which. Red staining Sigismund’s tabard; red decorating the deck beneath and around him; red in Abaddon’s eyes, misting his sight.

  Blood. So much blood.

  Here at the last, he looked every one of his years, with time’s lines cracking his face. He looked upwards at the chamber’s ornate ceiling, his eyes lifted as if in reverence to the Master of Mankind upon His throne of gold.

  Sigismund’s hand trembled, still twitching, seeking his fallen sword.

  ‘No,’ Abaddon murmured with brotherly gentleness, through the running of his blood and the heaving of his chest. ‘No. It’s over. Sleep now, in the failure you have earned.’

  The knight’s fingertips scraped the hilt of his blade. So very close, yet he lacked the strength to move even that far. His face was the bloodless blue of the newly dead, yet still he breathed.

  ‘Sigismund,’ Abaddon said, through lips darkened by his own lifeblood, ‘this claw has killed two primarchs. It wounded the Emperor unto death. I would have spared it the taste of your life, as well. If you could only see what I have seen.’

  As I stared through Abaddon’s eyes, I confess I expected the triteness of some knightly oath, or a final murmur in the Emperor’s name. I
nstead, the ruined thing that had been First Captain of the Imperial Fists and High Marshal of the Black Templars spoke through a mouthful of blood, committing the last of his life to biting off each word, ensuring he spoke each one in shivering, sanguine clarity.

  ‘You will die as your weakling father died. Soulless. Honourless. Weeping. Ashamed.’

  Sigismund’s last word was also his last breath. It sighed out of his mouth, taking his soul with it.

  In the apothecarion I opened my eyes, and found I had nothing to say. Words eluded me in the wake of Sigismund’s final curse.

  ‘Falkus brought Sigismund’s body from the Crusader,’ Abaddon told me. ‘He carried it himself.’

  Still I said nothing. Whether he desired it as a trophy – to join ­Thagus Daravek as an articulated skeleton crucified above the oculus – or whether he wanted to desecrate Sigismund’s corpse to some divine end, I could not guess.

  Abaddon looked incomparably weary once more, and I took the quiet as my cue to leave. He did not object.

  ‘There is something I must do,’ I said by way of farewell. ‘One last thread to cut.’

  He did not answer, nor did he watch as I left. He was seeing Sigismund again, dwelling on replies he could never speak to a brother he had once admired and who had died despising him.

  I sensed no sorrow from him as I left. I sensed nothing at all. And that hollowness, that emptiness, was somehow worse.

  Sargon had gathered a small conclave of warriors within his suite of chambers, and they stood in the candlelit space of his prayer chamber, speaking amongst themselves, awaiting the former Word Bearers Chaplain to begin proceedings. I had asked Sargon to gather them, and to take their sworn oaths in the privacy of his sanctum. If I sent the summons myself, it would have woken their suspicions in ways I wished to avoid.

  Eleven in total. Eleven surviving warriors that had witnessed the battle between Abaddon and Sigismund. It should have been twelve, but Zaidu was not there – Telemachon had done as he always did, and ensured his favoured lackeys answered to no one but himself.

  I chose not to let it concern me. I had business enough with these eleven souls. Two of them were warriors of the Shrieking Masquerade; the rest were from Amurael’s warband, the Flesh Harvest, warriors he had trusted with his life on countless occasions.

  Sargon bade them remake their oaths of silence – oaths they had already sworn to Telemachon and Amurael aboard the Thane, murmuring vows never to speak of what they had seen. No one outside those present for the duel itself could be allowed to know that Abaddon had come so close to falling in battle against Sigismund. Such unwelcome truths had no place in the legend we were carving.

  They all reaffirmed without objection, honoured by the ceremony. Each of them knew that deceit meant death, and that keeping their word meant the Ezekarion would look upon them with favour. This could be a grand opportunity. Leadership of squads, even lieutenants’ roles in a warband, were not out of the question. Fate had given them leverage and brought them close to the Ezekarion. They had no desire to squander this opportunity by proving themselves unworthy of it.

  These were the thoughts I felt from afar: the ambition, the temptation, the hunger. None of them had broken their oaths. They cherished the chance to be loyal.

  Sargon consecrated them, one by one, with blood blessings of the Eightfold Path gently drawn upon their foreheads with a gore-wet thumb. He dipped his fingertips into a bowl of slave viscera and whispered that the Pantheon would look kindly upon each of them for keeping their lord’s secret.

  When Sargon was done, he tipped the bowl to his lips and drank the remaining gore. With care and patience, he placed the empty receptacle down and gestured for the warriors to leave, thanking them once more. They filed through his training room and across the bare metal deck, not yet beginning to speak amongst themselves. Their auras were alight with pride, with the sense of being inducted into secrets that were denied to their brethren.

  The bulkheads at the north and south of Sargon’s armoury sealed on grinding tracks, ending with cacophonic bangs of metal on metal. As both doors crashed closed, I stepped from the shadows before the eleven warriors.

  I did not say anything. The charade was over.

  Even if I had wanted to speak, there was no time. Several of them realised what was happening at once. The two Raptors of the Shrieking Masquerade cried their piercing, weaponised hunt calls, reaching for chainblades and gunning them to life. In the same moment, four of the others went for their bolters and opened fire. The shrieks drifted past me, ignored. The bolts slammed and burst against a kine shield I raised with a gesture of my bionic hand.

  I did not tell them to surrender and give in to the inevitable. I could have promised them it would be swifter and without pain if they accepted their fate, but I did not wish to lie to them. It was going to hurt whether they submitted or not.

  ‘Hold fire, hold fire!’ one of them, a squad leader, roared. He battered the others’ guns down. ‘Lord Khayon,’ he said, and looked at me with the faith of a true believer. ‘Lord Khayon, you don’t need to do this. We swore an oath. We would never speak of what we saw.’

  I admired his level-headedness. I did not admire his naïvety.

  Nagual leapt from the darkness, the tigrus-cat’s size and weight bearing the sergeant to the deck and eclipsing him in moving, clawed shadow. Ceramite warped. Blood arced and stank in the air. The remaining ten warriors moved without unity, shouting and firing and charging and seeking to flee.

  I hurled them away in every direction, pinning them to the walls with an outburst of telekinetic force, slamming them back against the iron in mimicry of high-gravity acceleration. Each attempt to wrench an arm or leg free of their pressurised bindings ended with the limb thudding back into place with magnetic force.

  Enough.

  The beast stopped its noisy feasting at once. The sergeant was still alive. He lacked a functioning throat, a chest and one arm, but he was still alive. The remains of organs pulsed slickly, slowing, in the broken shell of his chest.

  ‘Lord…’ he managed to murmur through black, stinking blood. The man’s endurance was nothing short of amazing. ‘Don’t… give us… to your eldar.’

  I smiled at the man’s dying request. I could, at least, grant his last wish.

  ‘You are not traitors,’ I replied. ‘You will not suffer a traitor’s fate. Goodbye, Sergeant Havelock.’

  ‘Lord–’

  Sometimes I still wonder what he was going to say. His attempts to speak were cut off by the blackening and swelling of his flesh, by the splitting and shattering of his armour plating, by the unformed words melting into a throaty scream of mutating vocal cords.

  Feathery wings burst, tattered and bony, from his back. The elongated avian beak that stretched and cracked from his face was stringy with bloody saliva.

  Come, Nagual.

  Master, the daemon acknowledged, following me at once.

  I left the chambers with Sargon and my familiar at my side. Once the bulkheads were sealed again, I relaxed my psychic grip on the ten warriors pressed to the walls. The way they clawed at the hull and the sealed doors was almost musical, the muffled sounds of their captivity.

  Bolters barked, sounding like distant thunder. Bodies crashed against metal. Legionaries shouted and then fell silent.

  Something vast cawed loud enough to shake the corridor outside the chamber, but I had been careful in my preparations. The creature – a ragged, black and raven-like example of its daemonic choir – would be weakened at once by the sigils of draining imprinted upon the walls. Its life span in the corporeal realm was measured in a matter of heartbeats after its executioner’s duty was done. Already its enraged laughter began to fade as its physical form dissolved.

  I looked to Sargon. ‘I apologise for the mess you will find in there.’

  He blinked slowly, uncaring
. I doubted he would even allow his slaves to cleanse the chamber. He had no aversion to such decorations in his sanctum. I left him there, left him listening to the Lord of Change dying in banishment, and returned to my other duties. With the Black Legion scattered and weakened, we had to ensure its first crusade was not destined to be its last.

  Soon we would bathe Segmentum Obscurus in fire.

  ‘…that is his blade I know that sword it is Sacramentum you lie you lie Khayon would never allow himself to be captured you lie you lie you breathe lies YOU LIE my brother would flense your souls wither them peel them from your bodies Khayon is not here you could never capture him he cannot be here he would come for me he would carve your souls from your bones he would save me Khayon KHAYON KHAYON KHAYON KHAYON PLEASE KHAYON…’

  – from ‘The Infinity Canticle’, sequestered by the holy order of His Imperial Majesty’s Inquisition as an Ultima-grade moral threat. Purported to be the unedited, raving confession of Sargon Eregesh, Lord-Prelate of the Black Legion.

  Terra

  We were free. Free of our prison, sailing at the vanguard of a colossal invasion of Imperial space.

  Our escape plunged the entirety of the Segmentum Obscurus into war. The conflict that raged for decades – that which you call the First Black Crusade – would eat at our resources as much as it replenished them, stealing as many gains from us as it granted.

  You know of the purges and sterilisations and recolonisations that followed the war, seeking to sear our existence from the minds of the Imperial faithful. We have forever been the Imperium’s dirty little secret, a truth never more pronounced than when the Adeptus Terra moves upon its own citizens, forcing them to forget we ever existed.