The Talon of Horus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  All these years later that psychic undertaking still held, keeping her alive on the very edge of death. It was not stasis, nor immortality, for she still aged in the incomparably slow way of her species. It was life – she was as alive as any other living being – only propelled by willpower rather than nature.

  My bloodward. My most complex work of Art.

  ‘That’s why you despise Sargon.’ Abaddon’s words were not a question.

  ‘Do you see that with your bleached eyes, as well?’

  Abaddon continued as if I had not spoken. ‘You can’t read his thoughts. You sense his barriers against psychic intrusion. Couple that with how he silenced your wolf and severed her from your senses... That’s why you reacted as you did, brandishing your Tizcan knife at his throat. His very presence threatens you, even if he means you no harm, even if he offers you nothing but brotherhood. He represents a potential you have no wish to consider – the chance that he could, somehow, sever you from Nefertari. That would leave her dead, wouldn’t it? Cut off from your power, severed from the spell that keeps her alive.’

  I had stopped walking by the time Abaddon finished speaking. I stared at him, hating him for seeing everything with such unbridled ease. I was past surprise now, and deep into distrust.

  ‘You see a great deal, Ezekyle.’

  ‘Tell me, Khayon, what did you do to the creature that killed your bloodward?’

  Those memories came easily. ‘I unmade her. I pulled Zarakynel apart until she was nothing more than loose threads of emotion and sensation, and I threw those strands back into the warp’s winds.’

  He knew better than to ask if I had killed her, for no one can destroy one of the Neverborn, but my malevolent banishing was more than the child’s play of spite. It would take the Youngest God’s beloved harlot years to rethread her form back into something capable of manifestation even within the Eye. I had unmade her beyond mere banishment.

  ‘We were aboard a fallen craftworld, conquered by the creatures of the Youngest God. Nefertari butchered dozens of them that day, perhaps even hundreds. They came from the warped-bone walls, shrieking with the voices of ghosts, bloated by the soulstone gems of devoured eldar. None of them could slay her, and every drop of her blood they managed to shed only had them howling louder. When she fell, it was for me. She could deflect the talon descending towards me, or defend against the one that would end her.’

  ‘She chose to save you.’

  I met his eyes as I replied. ‘Truthfully? I am not so certain. You have fought eldar. You know how they move, how they fight as quick as we think. Nefertari is faster than most, as a rare few of the Commorragh-born eldar are known to be. Her instinct was to defend against both. She caught one of the creature’s claws, breaking it before it could strike my chest. But the other pierced her here,’ I tapped my heart. ‘As I said, in and out, the work of a single second. Once it was over, I forced her flesh to re-knit, regenerating all I could. Leaching the memories from her mind was easy by comparison.’

  ‘Why steal her memories?’

  ‘Because all mortal bodies function by will as much as by rote. If she realises she is sustained by my psychic efforts, it may undo all my work within her.’

  Abaddon seemed to like the idea, as a considering smile overtook his features. ‘So if she realises she’s dead, she’ll die.’

  ‘That is a blunt and crude way of phrasing it.’

  Mercifully, Abaddon’s questioning was drawing to an end. ‘Unless I’m mistaken, Nefertari is a name of Tizcan origin.’

  ‘It is. It means “beautiful companion”. ’

  He chuckled at that. ‘You really are a sentimental soul, Khayon.’

  ‘Passion and loyalty are what make us warriors rather than weapons,’ I quoted the old axiom back to him. But privately, I wondered if his belief was even true. Was I sentimental? Nefertari had chosen that name, not I. Taking such a name was typical of her cold and preening sense of humour. What she wished to be called meant nothing to me, either way.

  ‘What is her real name?’ Abaddon asked next, making it my turn to smile.

  ‘Ah, so you do not know everything? I think I will keep at least one secret, Ezekyle.’

  ‘Very well. Answer me this, and I will let the matter lie – if you are capable of manipulating alien biology in such a way, can you do the same with a warrior of the Legions? Would familiarity with their genetic template make it even easier?’

  I looked at him as we walked onwards through the darkness. He met my stare, but revealed nothing in his gaze.

  I had resisted all predictions regarding Falkus and his warriors. In that regard I entered their domain blind, without the weight of expectation. When Abaddon asked me if I had received any word from them, I was forced to admit that Falkus had fallen silent months ago.

  ‘You choose the strangest times to respect someone’s privacy,’ Abaddon commented, not without the edge of annoyance. He was ever a soul who thrived on knowing every iota of information about those beneath his command.

  At one point he asked me if I had tried to exorcise the Neverborn sharing the warriors’ skins.

  ‘I would have tried,’ I said, ‘had any of them asked it of me.’

  Abaddon nodded at that. ‘From afar, I’ve watched my Legion die. Many of them sold their flesh for the promise of power. It’s easy to speak of resisting temptation, Khayon. It’s harder to resist it when staring down the barrels of a hundred bolters and a pact with the Neverborn is your only chance of survival.’

  I sensed no distaste in his tones or thoughts as he spoke of daemonic possession. He understood the sacrifice of it, even if he chose to resist its temptations. It must seem strange for Imperial minds to hear me speak of daemonic possession as an ascension or an achievement, when the human mind rebels at the very idea. The truth, as always, is somewhere inbetween. For those strong enough to conquer the beast within their hearts, it offers exultant strength, unnatural insight and perception, and near-immortality. Many pray for it, or undertake journeys of their own to seek out Neverborn intelligent enough and willing to risk such fusion. Rarely is it as simple as immersing oneself in the raw warp and emerging stronger on the other side.

  That was what interested me most in Falkus’s state, and what bade me keep my distance as he went through the Change. It felt arranged, orchestrated by a conscious hand. I refused to act until I was aware just what pieces were on the game board. Who were the pawns, and what was the players’ endgame?

  Sargon was behind it. I was certain of that now. He had aided Falkus’s warriors in escaping to their ship, only to abandon them when they most needed his guidance through the storm. They were bathed in the warp’s wracking, purifying tides while he returned – untouched and unchanged – here to the Eleusinian Veil.

  We passed four of my Rubricae standing guard at one of the primary transit routes back to the main passages – they acknowledged my passing without lowering their bolters. A glance at their weapons showed they had not been recently fired. If Falkus and his Secondborn kindred had sought to escape while I had been aboard the Vengeful Spirit, they had not come this way.

  It did not take long to make note of their influence, for the Secondborn’s presence twisted reality. Black veins cracked their way across the old metal walls, and the Anamnesis’s bronze faces were warped into daemonic visages now resembling female gargoyles and grotesques. The air carried unintelligible whispers, as well as the wet sounds of gluttonous feasting. Breathing in made my senses ache with the ripe taste and tang of marsh water. The Secondborn contained within this district were not polluting or tainting their surroundings. It was nothing more than the strength of their thoughts and desires reshaping the world around them.

  Years before, in a more innocent age, such mutation would have put me in mind of corruption – of diminishment and crippling changes. However, I was once a very naive creature. The warp’
s touch is inhuman yet not inherently evil, and while it is undeniably malicious, it also reshapes those it caresses according to their own psyches. This is why so many among the Nine Legions consider themselves blessed by the Pantheon when mutation threads its way through their physical forms. Emotion is encouraged, zealotry rewarded, violence and passion held as sacred.

  The warp never renders its chosen sons and daughters useless, but that is not to say all of its blessings are desired and cherished by mortal minds. What benefits the malignant Pantheon is not always what the warp-touched souls have hoped for. Some mutation is enhancement and refinement. Some can feel closer to ruination.

  As I hang here in chains now, speaking of the distant, I can feel Inquisitorial eyes noting my mutations with revulsion. The warp has reforged me according to my hatreds, my desires, my furies and my sins. I have not looked truly human in millennia.

  But I care little for how I appear to mankind. Even when I looked human, I was still a sterile weapon of flesh and ceramite elevated above humanity, as oversized and unlovely to mortal eyes as any other warrior of the Legiones Astartes. Where Imperials may run screaming from me as a monster in their midst, there are thousands of souls within the Great Eye that feel keen, depthless jealousy over the ways the warp has moulded me. My years as a warlord of the Black Legion have been far from unkind.

  As we made our way through the altered tunnels, Abaddon made no comment on the changes done to the ship. I knew even without asking that the Vengeful Spirit likely held countless changes akin to these on the decks I had not yet seen.

  We moved through a hive-like series of unused hydroponics chambers, where the smell of ancient vegetation still lingered. Less an arboretum and more a laboratory, now the troughs and cradles stood empty, where once this whole subsection had been a haven of green life. The Tlaloc had thirty such hives to supplement the ration packs consumed by the human crew. Most had long since fallen into disrepair, be it from the necessary skills atrophying amongst the warship’s mortal thralls or the Eye’s effects on lab-grown vegetation.

  ‘Are you not worried that Falkus will despise your oracle?’

  Abaddon’s eyes actually gleamed with psychic resonance in the dark. I had only ever seen such a thing among the Neverborn.

  ‘And why would I be worried about that, Khayon?’

  ‘You know why. Sargon’s hand guided them to this juncture.’

  ‘You’re so certain of that?’

  ‘Very well, Abaddon. Plead ignorance if you wish.’

  We found the first of Falkus’s warriors alone in one such chamber, standing motionless in his wargear. His Terminator armour looked blackened by immolation, with its helm brutally tusked in a feral glare. The warrior’s lightning claws were idle at his sides, the blades inactive. As we drew closer, I saw why. They were not the consecrated iron of standard design, but talons of dense bone lengthening out from the gauntlets’ fingertips. His armour looked wholly fused to his flesh, which was hardly uncommon among those of us dwelling within the Eye. The stinking, silvery poison dripping from the bone claws was closer to unique. It resembled mercury and smelt of spinal fluid.

  I sensed nothing at war within him. No daemon and mortal locked in restless coils, just... calm. The first strings of cobwebs linked his helmet to his shoulder, and his ankle to the deck plating. He had been standing here like this for a few days, at least. Waiting.

  ‘Kureval,’ Abaddon greeted the warrior. The Terminator turned his head in a lumbering drift, armour joints growling. The same silver poison ran in slow trickles down his tusks.

  Before the warrior spoke, I felt his thoughts lock into place. That is the closest I can come to describing the sensation – where dead, distracted pain filled the Justaerin’s skull as we approached, the moment his attention fixed upon Abaddon his thoughts aligned into recognisable patterns. He became human in Abaddon’s presence, as though his former First Captain was some kind of psychic anchor.

  ‘...High Chieftain?’ Kureval’s voice was a grinding purr, cooled by disbelief.

  Abaddon’s answer was to bare his teeth in a vicious smile through the ratty fall of filthy hair.

  ‘High Chieftain,’ Kureval repeated, and lowered himself into a kneel at once. The Terminator was malice given form, and a warrior strong enough to lead a warband in his own image. To see him kneeling three seconds after seeing his former commander once again was a trifle disconcerting. I was beginning to realise just what a presence Abaddon was to his warriors.

  The former chieftain of the Justaerin made no mockery of his brother’s obeisance. He rested his hand on Kureval’s shoulder-guard, whispering a Cthonian greeting even my enhanced hearing could not catch. Every Legion has its rites and rituals unseen by outsiders. I felt like an intruder trespassing during a private ceremony.

  The Terminator rose slowly, armour joints snarling. Like the rest of the Justaerin, his armour was the black of his Legion’s elite rather than the traditional sea-green of the common Sons of Horus.

  ‘Come with us, Kureval.’

  The Terminator raised no objection, following in a slow and obedient stride. He paid me no mind at all, reserving his whole focus for Abaddon. I do not know if Kureval believed his former commander was a vision or not.

  ‘I sense little of the daemon within you,’ I said to the warrior as we walked. ‘Did you expel it from your flesh?’

  His answer was a low, gurgling growl. I wondered if it was a laugh.

  On we walked, and the process repeated itself again and again. Falkus’s warriors were scattered throughout the subdistrict, each one standing motionless, statuesque in their isolation. Some faced walls, some stood next to shut-down waste processing generators; three occupied different sections of the same chamber, staring out of the reinforced viewglass at the planet turning below.

  All of them awakened in Abaddon’s presence, as though his nearness brought their spirits back to dwell within their flesh. All of them followed in a loose column, putting up a chorus of heaving joint mechanics. I heard the clicking of vox communication between them as they walked, though they kept me excluded from it.

  I sensed no predatory essences within any of them. All of them sported biomechanical mutation to some degree, with protrusions of ceramite and bone melted together to form spines, crests and blades, and most leaked with the venomous secretion that ran from Kureval’s claws, but their souls were their own. No daemonic presence nestled deep in their hearts, nor bubbled near the surface, skinriding them as puppets.

  It was impossible that all of them had managed to throw the daemons from their flesh. Yet what I sensed had no easy answer: it was not just the absence of an intruding Neverborn intelligence – there was no wounded hollowness after a soul has been torn open when casting out a daemon’s touch. It was as if the daemon had burrowed deep within each of them, the way vermin dig to escape the light.

  Questioning the warriors as they strode forth yielded no insight. Several greeted me by name, as comradely and warm as if we had not just come upon them standing mind-dead in the dark. Whatever meditative state they had been in before we discovered them was banished by this show of vitality.

  By the time we found Falkus, sixteen of the Justaerin thudded along the deck behind us. It felt almost funereal despite their apparent vitality.

  Falkus occupied another dry, dead hydroponics laboratory. He was as motionless as the others, and reacted the same as they had when Abaddon drew closer.

  ‘Falkus,’ Abaddon said softly. The horned helm rose and turned, and behind the red eye lenses I sensed the warrior’s thoughts sliding into alignment. I have called it an awakening, but that is not quite true. It felt like a restoration, not a rise from slumber.

  ‘Khayon,’ he said first, his voice sluggish, like blood from a corpse. And then, ‘Ezekyle. I knew you weren’t dead.’

  ‘My brother.’ Abaddon was not content with a distant greeting
. He gripped wrists with his former lieutenant, his aura flaring with the colours of confidence.

  I confess I paid little heed to their reunion. As they spoke of all that had transpired at Lupercalios, I turned away, looking over the gathered Justaerin. My senses blossomed outwards, becoming a web of finger-like probes seeking cracks at the corners of their minds.

  I was so foolish. So completely blind. What had been invisible to me while reading each of them separately became utterly obvious the moment I watched them in a disordered pack. Back aboard Niobia Halo, the daemons within the caged Justaerin had felt unnaturally similar, each equal to its kindred in strength and resonance. Or so I had thought. The truth was much more fascinating, and I cursed myself for missing its nuances until now.

  They were bound together by a single Neverborn spirit. Not a host of daemons possessing them in absolution, but a single creature threaded through them like fine mist. They breathed it in and breathed it out. It spiced the blood in their veins, diluted almost to nothingness. This was bio-daemonic manipulation of staggering subtlety. Spread through every one of Falkus’s warriors, the daemon had assured its immortality within the material realm. As long as one of the Justaerin lived, the daemon could not die.

  Nor was it an entirely useless symbiosis for the Justaerin. The daemon drifted through their thoughts without the strength to shape their emotions, yet it joined them in a weak communion that almost approached telepathy. While I doubted they could communicate in silent speech, they moved in a strange, preternatural unity – the way a flock of birds on the wing will wheel in unison – and their perceptions felt keener, sharper as they stood together.

  To learn how deeply this symbiosis ran, I chased the daemon within them. Its presence, already faint, diluted further in an attempt to flee from my scrutiny. Most Neverborn would resist by aggressively reshaping their hosts; this one broke itself apart inside them. Every time I reached for a sensory trace of the creature, it dissolved its essence further, thinner, fainter. I was chasing echoes in the Justaerin’s bones, and hunting bubbles in their blood. All the while I cursed the creature for its incredible subtlety. If I could acquire its name, I was committed to binding it at once, no matter the cost to Falkus’s men. Such a cunning, unique daemon would have a hundred uses.