The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Lheor grunted when his boots locked to the deck nearby. I felt two things from him in that moment: the first was his revulsion at what was coming through the open conduit, the second was the hammer-and-nail pressure of his cranial implants – those brutal aggression amplifiers that were wired so primitively through his brain. They pounded the heat of a forge fire into the meat of his mind, forcing painful facial tics as they burned his nerves.

  I closed my hand into a fist, shattering the bones of the globular thing I’d been holding aloft in a telekinetic grip. It came to pieces, dissolving as it died.

  ‘Go,’ I said to the seven remaining World Eaters. The slit in space was a black so deep and starless that it looked like the inside of something alive. ‘Go through.’

  I sent Go, adding the weight of willpower so the order breached the blood-soaked haze of their wounded brains. They started running, each of the red and brass warriors cleaving through the manifesting Neverborn on their way into the conduit.

  We, ah, suddenly seem to have World Eaters on board, Ashur-Kai sent in dry exasperation.

  How many?

  Six.

  There will be seven.

  A moment’s warning would have been preferable, Khayon. My Rubricae almost annihilated them.

  More souls nearby. I heard them as whispers of half-caught words, and shards of other men’s memories.

  A disorderly group of Emperor’s Children armoured in black, silver and pastel hues of rose and coral drifted in through the strategium’s eastern doorways. Several of them crawled along the ceiling and walls. All of them were looking at me, and the first of them raised pistols and bolters in the ragged unity known only to Legion-brothers. My eye lenses flashed, marking every threat with targeting subreticules.

  They fired. I saw the muzzle flickers of igniting shells. My senses were still locked on maintaining the conduit, seeing more of the spectral than the material. I could see the warriors’ auras, the fevered emanations of thought and emotion that surrounded them; in the same second, I saw the paths of their bolter shells, knowing where they would strike if I allowed it.

  My hand came up, palm towards the intruders. It felt so slow. It cannot have been slow – all of this happened before my heart could beat twice – but it is a common enough sensation among the psychically gifted. When we use our powers to manipulate the aether, it seems to render all mundane sensation sluggish.

  I stood with my palm raised towards the Emperor’s Children and said, very calmly, ‘I think not.’

  The shells burst against the rippling barrier of telekinesis before me. I let the shield fall once its purpose was served. Djedhor was still firing, his focus on the Neverborn. Lheor had his heavy bolter aimed at the Emperor’s Children, awaiting my word.

  But as I lowered my hand, the Emperor’s Children didn’t fire again. I sensed their unease, a rippling tide of it pressing against my senses, as salty as sweat and as sour as bile. Sorcerer, their minds were hissing. Sorcerer. Sorcerer. Stay back. Be cautious. Sorcerer.

  The squad’s leader touched down on the deck with a magnetic locking of his clawed boots. His sword hung at his hip, not in his hand, and his helm’s faceplate was a silver burial mask, showing a handsome face of surpassing serenity. Something drawn from the bleak grandeur of human myth.

  ‘Captain Khayon.’ Such a voice. A voice to preach gently and passionately from the pulpit. A voice to sway souls and cleanse consciences. ‘I would speak with you before you run.’

  His armour was black, edged by plates of metallic rose. Bone showed through the ceramite, not in violent, knuckly protrusions but in sculpted artistry, inscribed with Chemosian runes telling tales I could only guess from this distance. At first I thought dead, flayed skin was cloaked over his shoulders. The illusion was shattered when several of the faces moved. To my targeting locks, the skinned faces on his cloak were nothing but lifeless flesh. To my second sight, they yet lived in some stunted, flayed existence – lungless and tongueless, moaning only in silent torment.

  ‘Do not seek to shoot me again,’ I replied. ‘It irritates me.’

  ‘So I see. And do you recognise me?’

  I did not, and told him so. I had seen hundreds of brothers and cousins among the Nine Legions since our exile into the Eye, and though many bore signs of the warp’s touch or changes wrought through the Art, I had never seen a cloak of silently screaming faces, nor did I recognise him beneath the changes that had overtaken his armour. He was far from the Space Marine he had been. But then, so were we all, for better or worse.

  ‘Telemachon,’ he offered his name with the same inspiring softness that implied neither kindness nor weakness. ‘Once Captain Telemachon Lyral of the Third Legion’s Fifty-First Company.’

  My hands tightened on Saern’s haft. He saw it and inclined his head. ‘Now you remember me,’ he said.

  Oh, yes. Now I did. And I had the Ragged Knight with me. Temptation burned in my blood, sharp and hot, real enough to feel.

  Go, I sent to Djedhor. He obeyed, still firing into the Neverborn, and vanished into the conduit. Ashur-Kai’s voice chimed back at once.

  Djedhor is through.

  The moment Ashur-Kai uttered those words, an immense weight bore down upon all of us. Gravity returned to the stricken ship with queasy force, and the bridge’s illume-globes, dead and bare to the void for decades, flickered back to life. Floating cadavers dropped to the deck, breaking into desiccated ruin. The bridge’s struggling light cast a pale glow over those of us who would defile this deep-space tomb with our own selfish bloodshed.

  Lheor cursed as he was pulled to his knees, fighting hard to regain his balance. They’d reactivated the generators – no doubt to detonate the hulk or take it as salvage.

  My senses were aflame in the cold with the pressuring nearness of so much life. More Emperor’s Children, flooding down the passageways. More, more, more. Telemachon and his men stalked closer, wary of us now. Wary of me.

  Lheor lifted his heavy bolter but I lowered it again with a press of my hand. Untended, unheld, the conduit collapsed in upon itself. The Neverborn’s wails fell silent, though not before one last creature raced through into the chamber. A black huntress, feral and snarling.

  I ordered you back to the ship, I sent to her, and received only devoted defiance in return.

  Where you hunt, I hunt.

  My wolf. My loyal, beloved wolf. Hide, I demanded. Be ready.

  Gyre vanished into my shadow with a familiar, savage heart brushing against my mind. There she lay in wait, hidden and hungering.

  Without a word, I cast a tarot card onto the deck before the Emperor’s Children, and waited for them to die.

  Permit me a moment to tell you a tale – a tale of blood and betrayal that took place an eternity before this last, dark millennium, and many dozens of centuries before Lheor and I stood aboard the wreck of His Chosen Son. An ancient story, but one with stark relevance, I promise you.

  This story takes place in the impious ages of Old Earth, in a land known as Gawl, also called the Franckish Empire. A princely holy man of the Steel Era that followed the Bronze and Iron Epochs believed himself able to hear the words of his faceless deity. To reflect his self-proclaimed purity, he takes the name Innocent, and then he takes his followers to war.

  Lord Innocent calls a crusade to eradicate a heretical sect, which our fragmented histories refer to as the Karthur. He demands they be burned for their sins against the imaginary god. But these holy warriors – these knights – clad in primitive armour and wielding swords of steel, are the princes and lords of their realm. To them, the virtues of nobility and honour matter above all. The people of their empire look to them for justice, and theirs are the blades that defend the virtuous weak from the evil strong.

  Until their overlord, Innocent, blesses them. He declares their actions to be sacred deeds done in the name of the god they beli
eve to be real. Any crimes they commit in this war will be ignored. Any sins shall be forgiven.

  Siegecraft in this bygone age is fought with catapults of metal and wood that hurl boulders of stone. City walls are brought down by these primitive machines, crewed by peasants and mathematicians alike, and once the walls fall the foot soldiers march in, led by their lords and princes.

  Albajensia, the fortress of the Karthur heretics, falls at dawn. The sword-bearing knights lead their holy warriors into the city, and with all their sins forgiven even before they are committed, the crusaders show no mercy. The heretics numbered no more than a few hundred, yet the whole city burns. Men, women, children... all butchered on the knights’ blessed blades.

  But what of the blameless masses? What of the children who know nothing of their parents’ heresy? What of the thousands of loyal, devout souls who have broken no laws, and do not deserve death?

  ‘Kill them all,’ says Innocent, the primitive Warmaster of his age. ‘Kill them all. Our God will know who is loyal.’ He condemns thousands to death, not because they are guilty, but because he believes a mythological paradise awaits those unjustly murdered by his men.

  And thus, the city burns. An innocent population is wiped from the face of the world by the blades that should have defended them.

  Like every emotion and deed, this slaughter is reflected in the Sea of Souls. The hate, the fear, the rage and bitter sense of betrayal – all of it curdles behind the veil. Few things feed the warp as sweetly as war, and few wars hold the same rancid symbolism as those declared by the strong against the weak they are sworn to protect.

  Such slaughter gives birth to daemons within the empyrean. Countless mewling terrors born from individual moments of suffering and bloodlust. Above them, more powerful entities also swirl into existence: one born from a blaze, deliberately started, that claims a dozen lives at once; another arising from a mother’s abject horror at seeing her children spitted upon the lances of those she’d believed to be her noble and holy protectors. These acts, and thousands more like them, breed the Neverborn in the hell beyond reality’s veil.

  Sometimes, as with this crusade of Albajensia, a daemon is born that rises above its siblings, one that encapsulates all the miserable complexity, cruelty and blood-soaked shame of the genocide. Imagine that creature, born of this sublime betrayal. Imagine a spirit of war given life when a warrior caste turns its blades upon its own people, acting upon the words of a tyrant, in the name of a lie.

  Its skin is the bleeding red charcoal of scorched flesh, like the families who burned in their homes. Its armour is a fire-blackened mockery of the mailed knights whose treachery gave it birth. It carries a sword, just as those butchering knights carried swords, though its blade is graven with runic curses heralding the War God’s glory.

  The crimson and orange light that burns behind its eyes is the fire that lit the horizon as the doomed city blazed. When it opens its maw, each of its exhaled breaths is the echo of ten thousand dying screams.

  It calls itself the Ragged Knight.

  Smoke surrounded us, thick as a grave shroud, with the sound of distant shrieking. The smoke could have been from the mouths of roaring bolters, but it was not. The shrieking could have been the whine of weapons carving durasteel on other decks, but again, it was not. Both emanated from the thing sharing the chamber with us.

  I slid the deck of papyrus cards back into their leather-skin case and let them hang from the chain at my belt once more. Next to me, Lheor twitched with a butcher’s need. I rested my hand on his shoulder, in warning.

  ‘No,’ I breathed over the vox. ‘Do not move.’

  The Emperor’s Children were spreading across the command deck – towards us, around us, all squad unity lost. The smoke had turned them into no more than armoured silhouettes with gleaming blue eye lenses. We watched them panning their pistols and bolters through the smoke as they advanced. Several of them carried searchlights on their shoulders, which lit up with activation snaps, casting their beams this way and that, but the smoke resisted mundane illumination. The beam played over us twice, sweeping left and right. My eye lenses tuned down, darker, compensating for the brightness. One of the lights raked us, seemed to linger... and passed on. I sensed no shift of awareness. We were unseen, despite standing in their very midst.

  Telemachon did not lead them in. I felt him at the chamber’s edge. I felt his focus as a spear seeking my throat, just as I felt his irritation at losing us.

  Lheor trembled again, the twitches betraying his need to leap forward and kill our enemies. I could feel the pain in the back of his brain, the tick-tock of his cranial implants punishing him for holding his ground. I held my composure without even the suggestion of motion. I could hear my own breathing, the soft, regular sound of an ocean’s tide over the vox.

  The Emperor’s Children walked closer, moving through the chamber with their weapons high. Several fired, hitting nothing. We were one with the smoke. Barely there at all.

  One of them passed by us, close enough to touch, close enough for me to meet the empty eyes of the stretched, flayed face on his shoulder-guard. The grinding purr of his power armour was a mechanical snarl in the dark, and I heard his helm clicking as it cycled through vision filters. Then a crunch as he braced his bolter stock against his shoulder.

  ‘Here,’ he called to his brethren. ‘Here!’

  Lheor lunged. I stilled him with a hand on his pauldron and an effort of will that locked his muscles. He trembled, murmuring across the vox as our enemies surrounded us... and passed us.

  A shadow moved, something huge and black in the grey smoke. Its blade rammed clean through the legionary’s torso, lifting the thrashing, squirming warrior aloft. I stood in silence as blood and curses alike sheeted from his vox-grille. He fired even as he was being killed, his bolter spitting three shells down at his murderer. If the creature realised it was being shot, it made no sign of it.

  I was aware of Ashur-Kai’s demands that I return, his warnings that the Tlaloc was under fire, that I was risking everything. And I was aware that I didn’t care. When vengeance is all that remains to you, you take it no matter the cost.

  The sound of ceramite breaking is a wrenching metallic wail followed by a shattering crack. The sound of a living man being pulled apart is a juicy snap, like the crunch of wet lumber. Once you’ve heard these sounds, you never forget them.

  The warrior fell in bleeding pieces, and the black-in-the-grey shadow took its first step. An iron-shod hoof crushed the dying warrior’s head, smashing the helmet to purple shards, and grinding the mess along the deck.

  A heap of moist, shaking meat landed on the deck by my boots. I didn’t listen to the half-thoughts of its pointless, pain-soaked brain. My eyes were on the shadow in the smoke, as it turned towards me.

  ‘Khayon...’ the Ragged Knight growled through saliva-strung fangs. Its voice echoed aloud as well as in my mind. ‘I see you, Soulweaver.’

  And I see you, daemon.

  Dimly, I could make out the Emperor’s Children through the smoke of the daemon’s summoning, falling back to the doorway and taking up position. In moments, they would fill the room with bolter fire, and I could not ward us against it forever.

  Destroy my enemies, I sent to the Ragged Knight.

  Its great, horned head swung in a slow scan of the chamber, and its laughter heated the air we breathed. The creature’s amusement was a clinging pressure against my mind, sinking into the cracks between my thoughts. I had endured psychic attacks that felt less revolting.

  ‘Unbind me first,’ it grunted.

  Obey me, I sent back with all the calm I could muster. Or I will unmake you.

  I don’t know if it believed me capable of such a feat or if the Emperor’s Children forced the daemon’s hand when they opened fire, but the shadow towering over us turned in a whipcrack of force, leaving nothing but curling smoke
in its place.

  I couldn’t see the slaughter beyond the dance of inhuman shadows in the charcoal mist. The smoke filling the room smelt of burning wood and seared flesh, and it remained thick enough to occlude sight, rising in sympathy with the Ragged Knight’s rage. Fragments of the fight reached me: I heard the voxing of orders, the roar of bolters kicking in clenched fists, the waspish buzz of power blades. I heard the sweeping air displacement of a massive sword swinging, the shatter-crack of splitting ceramite and the cries of dying men too proud to scream.

  It lasted no more than a dozen heartbeats. The sounds that followed were watery snarls and sticky growls, followed in turn by great gulping swallows as the smoke thinned.

  The Ragged Knight was crouched among the dead – eighteen warriors in all – with its horn-crested head tilted back to face the ceiling. The daemon swallowed with gagging sounds, letting chunks of armoured flesh run down its gullet without chewing. Gnarled black and red hands, all knuckle and bone, reached for its next portion even before the previous delicacy had gone down.

  Several ceramite-clad carcasses leaked a chemical cocktail of synthetic fluid from the cabling of their joints. The daemon was using four of them as a throne.

  I watched the Ragged Knight eat a warrior’s head, shoulder, one arm and spinal column, whole. It gagged as it swallowed, but it never resorted to breaking the meal apart with its teeth.

  Lheor tensed, clutching his axe tighter. He had seen daemons before, thousands of them, but few this powerful, and this close, without standing against them on a battlefield.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said softly.

  The Ragged Knight looked down at us in a vicious twist of attention. Its blade was planted nearby as a victory banner, rammed through one warrior’s belly, pinning the still-living warrior to the deck.

  ‘Are you alone but for this one brother, Khayon?’ the daemon asked in its mucous growl. ‘Where is the white-skinned prophet? Where is the she-alien whose heart beats at your whim? Where is the little changeling?’