Vengeful Spirit

by Graham McNeill

  The battle had devolved into individual skirmishes, but it couldn’t go on like that for long. His pistol was empty. He tossed it as dead weight.

  Severian saw his target and moved like a displaced shadow towards Grael Noctua.

  The sergeant of the Warlocked saw him coming, which was unusual enough in itself. He grinned and took out his own blade.

  ‘Twenty-Fifth to Twenty-Fifth,’ said Noctua. ‘A battle with a pleasing symmetry to it, yes?’

  ‘So long as you’re dead at the end, symmetry can go to hell.’

  The two of them faced one another as though in the training cages. Crouched low, blade to blade, hands extended, eyes locked.

  Noctua made the first move, feinting right. Severian read it easily. He countered the real blow, spun low and stabbed into Noctua’s groin. Forearm block, return elbow smash that hit thin air. Severian trapped Noctua’s arm, slammed his forehead forward.

  Noctua threw himself backwards, dragging Severian with him.

  They rolled, fighting to free their knife hands.

  Severian got his free first. He stabbed into Noctua’s side. The blade scraped free as Noctua rolled with the blow. Severian pushed clear. Noctua’s weapon sliced the side of his neck, a hair’s breadth from opening his throat.

  ‘I always hated you, Severian,’ said Noctua. ‘Even before ascension.’

  ‘I never cared enough about you to feel hate.’

  They came together again. Thrust, cut, block, spin. Their blades like striking snakes. Both warriors had drawn blood. Both were evenly matched. Much longer and it wouldn’t make any difference.

  ‘You’re good,’ said Severian.

  ‘The Twenty-Fifth teaches its warriors well.’

  Severian flicked his blade at Noctua’s face. Blood spatter hit his eyes, and Severian slipped into that fraction of a second’s distraction.

  He rammed his dagger through the centre of Noctua’s chest, twisting the blade into his heart space.

  Noctua’s face contorted in pain.

  ‘Not as well as Cthonia,’ said Severian.

  The pain was incredible, the worst Loken had known.

  It filled him and crushed him. It bypassed every bio-engineered suppression mechanism. It kept the pain gate in his spinal column wedged open.

  Where Mourn-it-all had cloven his ribs, he felt the toxic afterburn of something vile enter his bloodstream. Had the blade been poisoned?

  He fell onto his side, struggling not to curl up and weep.

  Aximand stood over him and the script worked along the length of the fuller drew threads of crimson from the edge. Loken turned onto his front, keeping one hand clamped to the rift gouged in his armour. He crawled away, knowing it was useless.

  Varren lay moaning in a pool of his own blood. Aximand’s return stroke had taken his right arm at the elbow and split open his chest. Old wounds bled afresh, and his helmet was cracked across the centre.

  Loken lifted his head. The air in Lupercal’s Court grew thick, and he saw their last stab at a measure of victory horribly snatched away.

  Abaddon had finally put Rubio down and had Bror Tyrfingr pinned to the deck. The Fenrisian was still fighting the First Captain, but even his strength was not the equal of Terminator armour. Voitek’s servo-arms wheezed and clicked, trying and failing to lift him upright. Proximo Tarchon lay unmoving next to him. The Ultramarine still clutched his bloody gladius, but his head hung low over his cratered chest.

  Only Severian still stood, but he was surrounded by the Luperci with nowhere to go. The bodies of Ger Gerradon and Grael Noctua lay at his feet, their blood mingling in a spreading lake. Severian’s eyes darted from side to side, seeking a way out, but finding nothing.

  Loken heard his name being shouted and blinked.

  The gelid quality of the air receded and he took a great sucking draught into his lungs. It burned and the pain stabbed through him from the grievous wound in his side.

  He turned to the source of the shout.

  But what he saw made no sense.

  Iacton Qruze knelt before Lupercal’s throne with his back to Loken. The Warmaster held him clasped to his breast, whispering something in the Half-heard’s ear.

  Then Loken saw the Warmaster’s talons jutting from Qruze’s back.

  Horus wrenched his arm back and pushed Qruze away.

  Iacton crashed to the deck and Loken saw the gaping wound in his chest. Held aloft in the Warmaster’s dripping gauntlet were the twin hearts of Iacton Qruze. Both organs were bright with oxygenated blood and beat one last time.

  ‘No!’ cried Loken. ‘Throne, no!’

  He fought through the screaming fire saturating his body and scrambled over to where Iacton Qruze lay. The Half-heard’s eyes were wide and filled with pain. His jaw worked up and down, trying to speak, trying to make his last words meaningful.

  But nothing was coming. The pain was too intense, the shock of his imminent death too much.

  Loken held him, helpless to do anything more.

  Even had Altan Nohai lived, there would be no saving Qruze.

  Lupercal’s Court held its breath. None of the gathered enemies moved. A hero was dying and such a moment was worthy of pause, even in the midst of bitter fratricide.

  Loken’s pain was inconsequential in the face of what Qruze was enduring. Loken met Qruze’s gaze and saw an urgent need to communicate in them, a desperate imperative that superseded all other concerns.

  Qruze took Loken’s wrist in an iron grip.

  His gaze was unflinching. His ruined body spasmed as pain signals overwhelmed his brain. Yet even in the throes of the most agonising death, Qruze still put his duty first.

  ‘Iacton, I’m sorry...’ said Loken. ‘I’m so very sorry.’

  Qruze shook his head. Anger lit his face.

  He held his free hand out to Loken. He pressed something into his palm and closed his fingers over it. Loken went to lift it, but Qruze shook his head again, eyes wide. A pleading imperative.

  Not now, not here.

  Loken nodded and felt Qruze’s grip slacken on his wrist.

  The light in the Half-heard’s eyes went out, and he was dead.

  Loken laid Qruze down on the blood-soaked deck plate and reached down to a pouch at his waist. He pulled out the two Cthonian mirror-coins Severian had given him in the shadow of the Seven Neverborn and placed them on Iacton Qruze’s eyes.

  Loken’s grief was gone, burned away by anger.

  He pulled himself to his full height and looked up at Horus.

  The Warmaster stood before his throne, Iacton Qruze’s blood still weeping from the long talons of his gauntlet.

  ‘I didn’t want it to come to this, Garviel,’ said Horus.

  Loken ignored the ridiculous platitude and stood taller than he had ever stood before. Prouder than he had ever stood before.

  All the uncertainty, all the confusion and every shred of the madness that had kept him wrapped in delusions vanished. All compunction to revere the Warmaster was purged in an instant of loathing.

  Iacton Qruze was dead, and the last link with what the Legion had once been was broken.

  And with it, any last shred of belief that the Warmaster possessed any nobility or trace of the great man he had once been.

  Loken felt the words well up from a depthless reservoir of certainty within him. A valediction and threat all in one.

  ‘I guarantee that before the sun sets on this war, even if you win, even if I die here, you’ll rue the day you ever turned your back on the Emperor. For every planet you take, the Imperium will exact a fearful tally of Cthonian blood. I guarantee that even if you conquer Terra the fruits of victory will taste like dust in your mouth. I guarantee that if you don’t kill me today, you’ll meet me again. I will stand against you at every outpost, every wall and every gate. I will fight you with every sword at my command, with every bolter and every fist. I will fight you with bare hands. I will fight you with the very rocks of the world you seek to conquer. I will ne
ver give up until the Sons of Horus are dead and no more than a bad memory.’

  Loken took a breath and saw the Warmaster’s acceptance of his threat. Horus understood that Loken meant every word of what he had just said, that nothing could ever sway him from his course.

  ‘I wanted you back,’ said Horus. ‘Tormaggedon wanted to make you like him, but I told him you would always be a Son of Horus.’

  ‘I was never a Son of Horus,’ said Loken. ‘I was and remain a Luna Wolf. A proud son of Cthonia, a loyal servant of the Emperor, beloved by all. I am your enemy.’

  Loken heard a chirrup of crackling vox.

  He heard it again, coming from the helmet mag-locked to Qruze’s belt. He recognised the voice and despite the body at his feet and all they had lost to get this far, Loken smiled.

  He bent and lifted the helmet to his lips as a ghost-shadow moved across the silver orb of the moon through the glass of the great cathedral window.

  ‘How’s that hunter’s eye, Rassuah?’

  ‘I have him,’ replied the Tarnhelm’s pilot. ‘Say the word.’

  ‘Just take the damn shot,’ said Loken.

  The window blew out in a blizzard of shards. Sheeting lasers blasted into Lupercal’s Court as the Tarnhelm’s guns filled it with killing fire. The loss of atmosphere was sudden and absolute, over in an instant of ruthless annihilation.

  Air blasted into space, along with weapons, bodies and anything not mag-locked to the deck. Spent bolter rounds, stone fragments blasted from the walls and chips of broken ceramite. Glass and debris went too.

  Loken let the explosive decompression take him, hurling him from the Vengeful Spirit and into the void of space. Qruze’s body spun away from him.

  A crushing sensation of awful solidity seized his chest. His internal organs were shock freezing. Life-support systems in his armour registered the sudden change. It fought to equalise the pressure differential and forced his lungs empty to avoid lethal hyperdistension, but without a helmet it was a losing battle.

  Silver light bathed Loken.

  Fitting that a Luna Wolf should die by the light of a moon.

  Loken’s vision fogged. He felt sudden, shocking cold in his throat, as though his windpipe was filling with liquid helium.

  He tried to howl a last curse, but hard vacuum kept him silent.

  Loken closed his eyes. He let the moon’s light take him.

  And the Vengeful Spirit spun away in the darkness.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The road to Terra

  Half-heard no more

  Okay

  Great skeins and shawls and clusters of bright stars winked through the great viewing bay. The light of a galaxy that would soon belong to him.

  Horus stood at the farthest prow of the strategium, his hands laced behind his back. He was no longer clad in armour, but a simple training robe of pale cream, belted at the waist with a thick leather belt.

  The Sons of Horus fleet was breaking anchor, mustering for the next stage of the march to Terra. Scores of transports still ferried men and machines from Molech’s surface, but Boas Comnenus expected to be ready for system-transit within four hours.

  Ezekyle and Kibre wanted to send fast cruisers after the Imperial Cobra-class destroyer, but Horus denied them. His First Captain had railed against that decision, as he had when Horus refused to remove the futharc sigils.

  Horus was adamant – Molech’s Enlightenment was to be unharmed.

  Let word of this world’s fate fly ahead of the Vengeful Spirit on wings of terror. Despair would be as potent a weapon as tanks and Titans, warriors and warships in the coming years.

  Horus turned from the vista of stars and made his way back to the ouslite disc at the heart of the strategium. The Mournival awaited his orders, standing patiently as though the natural order of things would continue as it had before.

  He saw them all differently now.

  Horus knew them better than they knew themselves, but now he saw the things they kept hidden; the secret doubts, the cancerous thoughts and, deep down, the fear that they had taken a path that could only end badly.

  The war on Molech had stoked the fires of Ezekyle’s ambitions. Not for much longer would he be satisfied with a captaincy, even a First Captaincy of the Sons of Horus. Soon he would need something grander to lead. A Legion of his own perhaps? With the power Horus now commanded and the ancient sciences of Terra, the means to create new Legiones Astartes was within his grasp.

  Why shouldn’t his greatest warriors become their own masters?

  Falkus Kibre... a simple man, one unfettered to grander ambitions. He knew his place and any thoughts of bettering his station were purely in service of the Warmaster. Falkus would be loyal unto death.

  After his moment of doubt in the wake of Isstvan V, Aximand had painstakingly rebuilt himself. Even Dwell, with all its painful associations, had served to invigorate Little Horus with the desire to see the war won. The revelation of Garviel Loken’s survival had shaken them all, but it had hit Aximand particularly hard. The melancholy he had so long denied was his ruling characteristic now shrouded him in with the fear that Loken had been right to reject the Warmaster.

  Yet it was Grael Noctua who had experienced the most profound change. Horus saw the twin flames burning within him, one darkly gleaming and malevolent, the other bruised and subjugate. The Fenrisian had ruined Gerradon’s flesh, and the daemon that Targost had summoned needed a new body to host its essence.

  ‘Sire, what are your orders?’ asked Kibre.

  Horus smiled at the extra vowel at the end of the honorific. A natural development, given the power that now filled him.

  Power that had almost cost him his life to obtain.

  Not that to look at him anyone would know that.

  The many hurts he had suffered to win Molech had healed years ago it seemed. It was hard to be sure. His sons told him he’d only been gone moments, how could he tell them different?

  Molech was a far distant memory to Horus now.

  He’d fought wars, slain monsters and defied gods in those moments. He’d wrested the power of those same gods at the heads of vast armies of daemons. He’d fought in battles that would rage unchecked for all eternity.

  He’d won a thousand kingdoms within the empyrean, billions of vassals to do with as he pleased, but he’d refused it. Every pleasure and prize was his for the taking, but he’d denied them all. He’d taken the power his father had taken, but he’d done so without deception.

  He’d taken it by force of arms and by virtue of his self-belief.

  There was no bargain made, no promise to honour.

  The power was his and his alone.

  Finally, after everything, Horus was a god.

  ‘Sire, what are your orders?’ said Ezekyle.

  Horus stared at the veil of stars, as though he could see all the way from Molech to Terra. He extended a clawed hand, as though already cupping the precious bauble of humanity’s cradle.

  ‘I am coming for you, father,’ said Horus.

  The Tarnhelm had always been a cramped ship, but hidden in the shadow of Molech’s Enlightenment, it now felt obscenely spacious.

  Loken sat on his bunk, stripped out of his armour and wearing nothing but a bodyglove, a chest-hugging synth-skin bandage and dermal-regenerative.

  Varren was in an induced coma, as were Proximo Tarchon and Ares Voitek. The former Iron Hand’s servo-harness had exercised a hitherto unsuspected level of autonomy to take hold of Proximo Tarchon as Lupercal’s Court vented into space.

  Rubio sat alone at the table where they had shared a drink in the company of Rogal Dorn. The empty spaces where their brother pathfinders used to sit weighed heavily on the former Ultramarine.

  That any of them were here at all was nothing short of a miracle. Or rather, it was thanks to Rassuah’s preternaturally dextrous hands at Tarnhelm’s electromagnetic tether controls and their armour translocator beacons. She had followed their progress through the Vengeful Spi
rit and got them back aboard the Tarnhelm within a minute of shooting out the shielded window to Lupercal’s Court.

  She’d blasted clear of the Vengeful Spirit, weaving a path back through the gaps in the defensive net she and Tubal Cayne’s device had torn. There’d been no pursuit, which she’d attributed to Tarnhelm’s superior capabilities, but Loken wasn’t so sure.

  They’d caught up to the Imperial destroyer as it powered past the system’s fifth planet. Its engines were burning hot, its captain clearly expecting pursuit.

  But nothing was coming.

  The Warmaster’s fleet was still anchored around Molech.

  Loken looked up at a knock on the hatchway.

  Severian and Bror Tyrfingr stood at his door, clad in bodygloves and simple knee-length chitons. Loken hadn’t spoken to any of the pathfinders beyond operational or medical necessity since the Vengeful Spirit.

  Severian looked as fresh as he had the day they’d set out on their mission, but Bror’s face was bruised and raw from the beating Ezekyle Abaddon had given him.

  ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ said Bror.

  ‘He’s lying,’ said Severian. ‘It’s far worse.’

  ‘He’s lucky to have walked away from a fight with Ezekyle at all,’ said Loken. ‘Not many people can say that.’

  ‘I’ll get him next time,’ said Bror. ‘When the Wolf King leads the Rout back to the Vengeful Spirit.’

  ‘What is it you want?’ asked Loken.

  Bror held out a plastic bottle filled with clear liquid. Loken could taste its caustic flavour from the other side of the room.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Dzira,’ said Severian, pulling over a stool and producing three cups into which Bror poured them all a measure.

  ‘I thought we drank it all,’ said Loken. ‘And Voitek can’t possibly be well enough to distil more.’

  ‘He might be mostly metal, but we’ll be back on Terra before his sedation wears off,’ said Bror, limping over to take a seat. ‘No, I made this. There’s not a lot one of the Vlka Fenryka can’t rustle up after we’ve tasted it.’

  Loken took a cup and swallowed a fiery mouthful.

  He sucked in a breath as it went down. ‘Tastes just like it. Maybe even stronger.’