The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Abaddon,’ I said in soft awe. ‘Of all the hiding places...’

  Lheor stood with me, looking at the spinal towers rising up through the mist. ‘We should head inside.’

  ‘Khayon,’ said Telemachon behind us.

  I didn’t answer either of them. I was still playing out the possibilities in my mind. Abaddon had taken the Vengeful Spirit past the Firetide of the Radiant Worlds, into the unscannable depths of the Eleusinian Veil, and powered the ship down beneath the surface of this broken world. The audacity of the plan took my breath away. No wonder the warship had remained unfound for so long.

  ‘Khayon,’ Lheor said this time.

  ‘A moment, please.’

  My hand against the hull trembled with echoes, teasing my mind with the scent of smoke, the sound of bolter fire, and the lurching sensation of the vessel’s cannons firing in the skies above Terra.

  ‘Khayon!’

  I lifted my palm from the metal. ‘What is it?’

  Lheor gestured with his pistol. I followed the motion to where a servo-skull drifted further down the hull, bobbing in the mist. I just stared at it for several moments, unsure whether to believe my eyes. It kept coming closer, gently hovering.

  The merest expression of psychic influence dragged it through the air to land in my hand with a dull smack. An actual human skull, mounted with a tiny anti-gravitic generator, which allowed it to float, with both of its eye sockets filled by pict-recorders, sensor needles and focusing lenses.

  A chromium spinal cord quivered in an obscene parody of life, thrashing helplessly at my arm as I clutched the skull probe in my hand. Its mechanical eyes clicked and whirred as they refocused on my faceplate.

  ‘Greetings,’ I said to it.

  Its reply was an alarmed blurt of distressed code from the miniscule vox-speakers lodged in place of its upper incisors. The thing’s articulated spinal column thrashed harder, a serpent coiling and uncoiling in a way no natural spine ever should.

  I wondered who was watching us through its eyes. Assuming anyone was alive inside the ship at all.

  ‘I am Iskandar Khayon of the Kha’Sherhan. I come with Lheorvine Ukris of the Fifteen Fangs and Telemachon Lyras of the Third Legion. We are with Falkus of the Duraga kal Esmejhak. We seek Ezekyle Abaddon.’

  Still, it thrashed in my grip.

  ‘Let me see that,’ said Lheor.

  I tossed the augmented skull to him, expecting him to catch it. Instead, as it laboured in the air, trying to right itself on its weak anti-grav motor, Lheor smashed it aside with a swing of his chainaxe. Skull shards and metal shrapnel clattered across the shadowed hull.

  I looked at my brother for several moments.

  ‘Another glorious victory,’ I said at last.

  He grunted what may have been a laugh. ‘Was that a joke, Khayon? Be careful, else I’ll begin to believe there’s a soul trapped in that armour you wear.’

  Before I could reply, he tapped his toothed axe onto the hull beneath our boots. ‘Shall we go inside?’

  ‘The ship has several thousand access hatches,’ Telemachon pointed out. ‘You don’t need to cut i–’

  Lheor triggered the chainaxe. Sparks sprayed as he started carving.

  Despite time’s light touch on this world, the Eye’s influence showed throughout the Vengeful Spirit. The mist hid its external monstrousness, but the cold, cold threat of the flagship was perfectly evident inside.

  Many of the ship’s corridors were calcified into a labyrinth of bleached bone architecture. Grey formations of lustreless crystal knuckled up from the joints and cracks in the bone walls. The entire vessel rang with the sense of journeying through the corpse of some great beast, dead for centuries.

  Sparse power still flowed through the downed warship, manifest in overhead lights and wall consoles. The former occasionally flickered. The screens of the latter were drowned by quiet static. The ship’s main generators were still and lifeless, that much was obvious from the silence. What power existed was localised and faint, limited to a handful of systems.

  On several occasions, we were confronted by drifting servo-skulls. I greeted them each time, repeating our names and our business aboard the Vengeful Spirit, hoping that whoever maintained them would witness our presence through the skulls’ eye lenses. Most scanned us or recorded us, then immediately sought to flee on their chittering anti-grav motors.

  Lheor let most of them drift away, though he shot three of them, claiming that if Abaddon cared about us breaking their toys, the First Captain could damn well come and discuss it face to face. I found it hard to argue with such blunt initiative.

  Gyre remained silent all the while. After reaching for her once, I’d sensed her viciousness at my mere presence. Wherever she was, she was hunting alone.

  Metal remembers everything. Exposure to the Eye’s tides had drawn forth memories from the ship’s hull, manifesting echoes of the crew who had died serving aboard the flagship through the decades of the Great Crusade. Ghosts they were, formed from glass. Crystal faces leered from the bone walls, each one showing expressions of ugly harmony. The faces, so detailed as to be beyond even the work of a master sculptor, were masks of closed eyes and open mouths. If you moved close enough, you could see the crease lines on their lips. Even closer than that, and you could make out their pores.

  ‘Even their ghosts are screaming,’ Lheor said.

  ‘Don’t be simple,’ Telemachon chided him. ‘Look closer.’

  The swordsman was right. Each face was unmarked by strain lines of torment around the eyes that one would expect from a shouting visage. These men and women may have died in pain, but their echoes were not screaming.

  ‘They are singing,’ said Telemachon.

  I ran my gloved fingers down one of the visages, almost expecting its eyes to open and the song to rise from the glass mouth. These statues held life, of a kind. A dull presence drifted behind their closed eyes, not entirely dissimilar to the weak life within my Rubricae. But not quite the same.

  As I examined a crystal tongue, then the closed crystal eyes, I realised why the feeling was so familiar. It was the same spreading faintness of a soul leaving its fresh corpse, in the maddening seconds before the Gods pulled it into the warp.

  ‘These things make my skin itch,’ said Lheor. ‘I swear they move when you don’t look at them.’

  ‘I wouldn’t rule out the possibility,’ I replied. I touched one of them again, laying my fingertips against its forehead.

  I am Khayon. A wordless pulse, a focused sense of my own identity.

  I am alive, it sang silently, in a melody made of whispered shrieks. I screamed as the ship burned. I screamed as the fire sloughed the flesh from my bones. And now I sing.

  I lifted my hand away once more. How captivating, to see these serene faces as tomb markers for deaths of such agony. We had a similar custom on Prospero, forging exquisite burial masks for our fallen rulers. No matter how they died, we entombed them in a masquerade of golden serenity.

  Next I touched the outstretched fingers of an arm reaching from a joint in the ivory wall.

  I am Khayon, I told this one.

  I am alive. When I choked, I breathed the flames into my body. Every gasp sucked the fire into my throat. Blood filled my cooking lungs. And now I sing.

  No more. That was enough. I lifted my touch away.

  At a sudden glassy crack, I turned to see Lheor idly swatting at the crystal hands reaching out from the bone walls. They shattered as he slapped them with his gauntleted palm.

  ‘Stop that,’ I said. Each one he broke sent a lance of nasty, buzzing heat through my temples.

  ‘What? Why?’ He backhanded another straining arm, breaking it halfway along its length. The crystal stump remained, severed at the forearm, while the hand and wrist shattered on the bone deck in tinkling shards. For a moment, the
pain in my head went from heat to fire.

  ‘They are psychically resonant. You are making them sing, and the song is not a pleasant one.’

  He stopped. ‘You can hear them?’

  ‘Yes. Be glad you cannot.’

  We moved on to yet another T-junction. Lheor gestured left with his axe. ‘The median longitudinal corridor is this way.’

  ‘We are not going to the bridge.’

  He was still looking down the hallway leading to one of the vessel’s main spinal thoroughfares. ‘We should go to the command deck,’ he said.

  ‘We will. But I am going this way first.’

  ‘Why?’

  I aimed Saern down the opposite hallway. A veritable forest of grey crystal limbs was motionlessly reaching from the corridor’s walls, ceiling and deck. I didn’t need to touch them to hear their whispers. Clustered together, their weak psychic resonance was amplified enough to make my teeth itch.

  ‘Admittedly,’ Lheor replied, ‘that does look promising.’ We walked onwards, careful not to touch the crystalline hands.

  Damage stood out in stark contrast where the walls were still dark iron and clean steel. The ship had fought in the skies above Terra, boarded in the Siege’s final hours by countless strike teams of the Emperor’s elite. Their legacy was written on the cold metal in pockmarks of bolter-shell impacts and burn smears of laser scorching.

  ‘Do you feel anyone?’ Lheor asked.

  ‘I will need clearer context before I can answer that.’

  ‘Feel them. Sense them, with magic.’

  Magic. Again…

  ‘The ship’s machine-spirit is in coma-somnolence. There is life elsewhere, but I cannot be certain of its source. It may be nothing more than the ship’s crystal ghosts, or the sentience of the world itself dripping into the vessel’s bones. Everything feels alive, but it is a distorted, unfocused thing.’

  Lheor swore as his elbow cracked off a few reaching fingers. I winced, but said nothing.

  We moved on. Lheor was twitching every few steps, his fingers clenching and teeth grinding. I kept hearing him whisper over the vox.

  ‘It’s these crystals,’ he said when he saw me staring. There was a porcelain squeal as his teeth clenched again. ‘That’s why I was breaking them. They make the Nails bite.’

  Pain haloed him. He wore an invisible crown of it, and unborn daemons too weak to take form caressed his armour as he passed. More, they begged, desperate for sustenance, pleading for the fuel that would allow them to exist.

  I doubted most Neverborn felt Telemachon’s presence at all. He felt almost no emotion since I’d stripped his nerves and brain clean of sensation. I had seen him through Gyre’s eyes many times since his remaking, and his soulfire was a weak and insignificant thing when he was away from me. He would stand idle in chambers, almost as motionless as a Rubricae, breathing and staring, at one with whatever thoughts remained in his skull. Only when he was near me did sensation return to his mind. By such temptation was his loyalty secured. He hated me as much as he needed me.

  Time moved strangely in the Vengeful Spirit’s cold halls. My retinal display tracked the seconds passing in a brutally slow crawl, while Lheor reported that his chronometer settings were running in reverse. More than once I saw the crystalline echoes of the dead crew move at the edge of my sight. They were not all human – many were warriors of the Legiones Astartes, reborn as echoes aboard the flagship where they had died. Custodians in exquisitely detailed armour and battle-scarred Imperial Fists reached from the walls, the ceilings, the floor decking... All singing silent funeral songs of flame and fury. Some carried war spears, others hefted boarding shields – most clutched bolters in fists that would never fire a weapon again.

  One of them – a manifestation of a helmeted Imperial Fists legionary cut from grey glass – shattered into jagged shards as I drew near. It sent a buzz of pain through my temples, yet I heard Lheor grunt in something like relief. His cranial implants had been biting hard into the meat of his mind as we approached the glass revenant, and they eased with its shattering.

  When I think of the Vengeful Spirit now, I remember what we made of it after so many millennia of living aboard and sailing it to war. It was so very different that night when the three of us first walked its powered-down chambers. Even with its systems offline and the machine-spirit starved of all life, the cloying darkness was oppressive rather than barren. The legends stated it had been abandoned but it felt hidden, waiting. Not hollow, not empty.

  I cannot tell you how long we walked in that pregnant darkness. An hour. Three. Ten. Time had no meaning there, on that night. I remember that we passed through a power crucible, a chamber of inactive secondary generators leering at us from the shadows with the malice of slumbering gargoyles. It was on the other side of the chamber, as we entered the labyrinth of corridors once more, that a sine wave rose and fell at the edge of my retinal display, tracking a new sound. Footsteps, heavy and slow. Ceramite on the bone deck.

  ‘Khayon,’ Lheor warned, raising a hand to stop our advance.

  ‘I hear it.’

  A target lock immediately played over the newcomer as he rounded the junction ahead of us. He wore weathered and colour-faded armour scavenged and cannibalised from warriors of all Nine Legions, with a long fall of ratty, snarled black hair stringing across his features, half hiding his face. Even from this distance, I saw gold in his gaze. Unnatural, inhuman gold, turning his irises a metallic shade. In his fists he carried a bolter – just as plain and just as battered as his war-plate. Rather than take aim, he kept the weapon lowered, loose in his hands. The vox crackled as his suit’s systems auto-cycled into our shared channel.

  ‘I’ll thank you to stop breaking my servo-skulls.’ A resonant voice, gravelly but without rawness feigned for effect. A smiling voice.

  ‘I am Iskandar Khayon, and this–’

  ‘I know who you are. I knew even before you repeated your name to every servo-skull that found you.’

  ‘We have given you our names, cousin. What is yours?’

  The Sons of Horus legionary inclined his head before replying. ‘What exactly was the purpose of destroying those servo-skulls?’

  ‘It seemed likely to get someone’s attention,’ said Lheor.

  ‘Blunt logic is the hardest to argue. Try not to break anything else while you’re aboard. Really, brothers, civility mustn’t break down, else we’ll have nothing left.’

  He seemed to be paying us little attention now, looking down at an auspex built into his vambrace. I heard it giving the heartbeat thud... thud... thud of echolocation tracking.

  ‘The three of you came alone?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Where is Falkus? Ugrivian? Ashur-Kai?’

  ‘Aboard my ship, in orbit... Who are you? Name yourself.’

  ‘I used to be on thousands of hololiths across the length and breadth of the Imperium. Now you’re telling me I’m not even recognised by warriors of the Legiones Astartes.’ Our silence in response made him chuckle, dark and low. ‘How the mighty have fallen,’ he added.

  The warrior raked his armoured fingers through the mane of filthy hair, revealing a pitted, pale face that defied any attempt to discern his age. He could have been thirty or three thousand. War was written across his features in a lattice of old cuts and the pockmarks of heat-scarring. Battle marked him even if age had not.

  Eyes of sick, slick gold watched us without blinking. Amusement flickered there, warming his cold, metallic stare.

  And that was how I knew him. He no longer wore the great black war-plate of the Justaerin, nor was his hair bound up in the ceremonial topknot of the Cthonian subterranean work-gangs. He was a hollow shadow of the invincible warrior who once graced victory hololithics and Imperial propaganda transmissions, but I knew him the moment he met my eyes and shared his dry, bladed amusement. I had see
n that glance before. I had seen that expression on Terra, as the Palace burned around us.

  He looked at the three of us as we wordlessly stared. Lheor was the one to break the stalemate, doing so with an absolute failure of diplomacy.

  ‘Drop your weapon, Captain Abaddon. We’re here to steal your ship.’

  EZEKYLE

  In another age, the chamber had housed ten Battle Titans of the Legio Mortis, including towering structures of ammunition crates, loading gantries, repair cranes, and the arcane engines required by the Mechanicum in the maintenance of its god-machines. The Titans were gone, as was all evidence of their presence, but the huge chamber was far from empty. Part memorial, part archive, part museum – the hangar was now a monument to Abaddon’s journeys across the Eye and a testament to the inner workings of his mind.

  I felt Telemachon’s subtle awe and Lheor’s hesitant wonder. I knew my own surprise would show just as plainly, had the others been able to read my mind as I could theirs.

  Never before had I seen a chamber like it. Abaddon had led us here after our meeting in the corridor, evidently unimpressed with Lheor’s promise of thievery.

  The bones of an immense serpent creature were bound to one wall, displaying a beast large enough to swallow a Land Raider without chewing. The shortest fangs in its three-horned skull were the length of a chainsword, the longest were the height of a Dreadnought. Every tooth’s outward curve showed a ravine of sorts gouged into the ivory. Grooves, to let blood spurt from a bite and to prevent the fangs remaining stuck in prey. I did not want to know what a beast like this hunted that required it to bleed its foes rather than devour them whole.

  Several of the skull’s foremost fangs were shattered in the uneven breaks of blunt force trauma.

  ‘I met that on Skorivael,’ Abaddon explained, noting my interest. ‘They live beneath the largest ocean, in hives of poisonous coral.’

  ‘The shattered fangs?’ I asked, still staring at it.

  ‘I broke them with a power fist,’ he said. ‘It was trying to eat me.’