Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  That most potent and pure of motivations.

  Revenge. Vengeance bought at any price.

  I, too, had changed. I no longer suffered the nightmares of wolves. The somnolent reflections of my burning world had receded, and with them faded the helpless hatred that had tasted a little too much like fear. Memories of grey warriors no longer howled through my mind, just as Gyre no longer walked by my side or guarded my slumbering form. Gone was the Fenrisian axe I carried into battle. Gone too was my armour of cobalt and polished bronze. The ceramite I wore was colourless, edged in dull metal.

  I was remade. No longer a soldier of the Great Crusade or a ­heretic of a failed rebellion, I was a warrior of the Long War – as I have been every day since, as I will be until my final breath. Perhaps that last gasp of life will be within this very cell and it shall taste of this stagnant air. I don’t know.

  This is what I do know.

  I am he who tells of the rage of angels. I am the emissary that speaks the blasphemies of a false god’s exiled sons.

  I am Iskandar Khayon, called Khayon the Black, Breaker of the Crimson King, Raider of Graves, Lord of the Ashen Dead, Third of the Ezekarion, Lord Vigilator of the Black Legion. I am the judge of my brothers’ sins and the taker of traitors’ heads. I am what my brother needed me to become – now, as ever, I am his blade at the throats of his foes. I am a blinded, tortured prisoner in Inquisitorial ­shackles. I am the Herald of the Crimson Path.

  The seeds of our conquest were born in the fallow ground of Abaddon’s own ambition, but we cannot ignore the whips that cracked against his back. Let us speak, then, of Moriana and Thagus Daravek.

  Daravek, the battle-king and Lord of Hosts, remains my greatest failure. Few others have come as close to killing our dreams of vengeance as Thagus of the Death Guard, at the head of his armada.

  And as for Moriana… Look for that name in your own ancient records, inquisitors. You will find her there, secreted within the deepest shadows. Doubtless her presence spread the same poison among your roots that it spread among ours.

  Let this archive chronicle the beginning of what the Imperium now calls the First Black Crusade. I will tell you of the roots of the war and the first bloody battle when at last we broke free of our warp-wrought prison, when an ancient knight-king fell into darkness and when my brother sought to claim the sword fated to end an empire.

  I swear to you on whatever tattered scraps remain of my soul, every word on these pages is true.

  From shame and shadow recast.

  In black and gold reborn.

  ‘…Daravek Thagus Daravek he bled us he butchered us even Ezekyle didn’t know the threat we couldn’t have known it is Khayon’s fault Khayon is to blame my brother Khayon he could not do it he could not do as he was ordered Khayon was blind he could not see the traceries of fate and he would not believe…’

  – 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.

  Weapons

  ‘Khayon, I know you’re here. I can smell your mongrel stink.’

  Daravek’s voice was a rusted hacksaw, a thing of flaky corrosion and rotting edges. ‘Show yourself. Let us finish this.’

  He was talking a great deal, almost always a sign of desperation in a warrior. I dared to think that control of the situation was ­slipping through his fingers, and challenging me like this was the only way he could try to reassert his dominance.

  Around us, above us, sirens were crying out their warnings. They had been doing so for several minutes. In Daravek’s defence, he had done very well to last this long.

  But I had him. At last, I had him. Tonight I would bring his bones to my lord Abaddon.

  Thagus Daravek was an immense, bloated monster, swollen by the favour of his patron Gods. Wet filth crusted the overlapping plates of his battle armour, sealing the seams with undefined bio­mechanical vileness. The ceramite around his torso and one of his legs was warped with diseased swelling and fusion of the flesh within, and horns of bronze thrust through punctures in the ­mangled armour. The bronze spines were veined, somehow alive, and bleeding vascular promethium. The vulture’s wings that rose in ragged majesty from his shoulder blades were spindly, trembling things despite their size, the feathers and tattered bones burning in heatless waves of warpfire. Ghosts, or things that looked like ghosts, reached out from those flames.

  ‘He is here,’ Daravek said, deep and low, as he paced. His jaundiced eyes drifted from warrior to warrior among his elite guard. Blood decorated his face from the slaughter so far. It bubbled, slowly dissolving on the active blade of his axe. ‘I know he is here, riding within your bones. Which one of you was weak enough to fall to the mongrel magician?’

  Even as I clenched my consciousness away from the risk of discovery, even as I dissolved my essence thinner than mist and threaded it through the blood of my host body, I felt a stab of irritation at the word ‘magician’, uttered in Gothic heavily accented by life in the highlands of Barbarus.

  But now was not the time to amend the warlord’s ignorance.

  ‘Was it you, Symeos?’ he asked one of his warriors. The metal chamber shook around us. Statues to incarnations of the Undying God and the Shifting Many trembled, given shivering life by the assault on the fortress. Symeos tilted his helmed head, bearing his throat before his master’s blade.

  ‘Never in life, Lord Daravek.’

  Daravek levelled his axe at another of his closest brethren. Some of them shared the same traits as their liege lord – the warped bloating of preternatural disease, the encrusted corruption of once pristine battleplate. This one did not; he was cadaverous in a drier, more ghoulish sense. There was something parched about him, something that spoke of undesecrated tombs beneath the earth, decorated with the untouched dust of centuries.

  ‘Ilyaster?’ Daravek asked. ‘Was it you, brother?’

  ‘No, my lord,’ Ilyaster said with the ugly rasp that served as his voice. He was unhelmed, and the words were a carrion-scented breath through blackened teeth.

  Daravek swayed to the next warrior. To me. His eyes met mine, his toxic respiration caressing my face. ‘Tychondrian,’ he said. ‘You, brother?’

  I was also unhelmed. I snarled through jaws that could barely close due to the length of my uneven fangs.

  ‘No, lord.’

  The fortress gave another titanic shudder around us. Daravek turned away, laughing, truly laughing. ‘You could all be lying, you worthless wretches. Nevertheless, the day is far from done. We must get into orbit. We will go where Abaddon’s mongrel cannot pursue.’

  I was instrumental in the birth of the Black Legion, yet the truth is that I was absent for many of the battles that formed its genesis. While my brothers waged war and fought to survive, I worked in an isolation that bordered upon exile. I cannot say that I never resented Abaddon for this, but I have always understood it. We each play the part to which we are best suited, and he did not need another general, or yet another warrior. He needed an assassin.

  This is not a rare role for souls of great psychic strength among the Nine Legions. We possess talents and masteries that make murder something of a specialty. In a realm where deception and assassination are plagued by a million unnatural considerations – where stealth and a sniper rifle are next to useless; where physical laws scarcely apply; where every single foe is preternaturally resistant to venom and poison – those with the power to remake reality make the finest murderers.

  Use of the Art, manipulating the matter of souls, allows one to bypass such limitations. A warrior who may never best his brothers with a blade can bind daemons to his will. The same warrior, who may be mediocre with a boltgun and bear no awards for either valour or mastery, can rewrite the minds of his foes to his own w
ishes. A marksman that has learned every scrap of intelligence about his target may try to predict his foe’s actions, but a sorcerer that has seen into his enemy’s soul knows every iota of lore without needing to resort to crude guesswork. And if you give credence to such things, the sorcerer may have walked the paths of fate and seen a host of possible, probable futures, and can manipulate events to bring about the most desired ends.

  Yet if I am making this sound easy, I am doing a disservice to the slayer’s craft. Most of these undertakings are monumental. Many are impossible without a coven of allies and apprentices, both of which I have used in abundance across the millennia. Sometimes, however, I work alone, and those sorcerers capable of such feats must be psykers of immense strength. I do not say this lightly. My reputation among the Nine Legions has been hard earned, and there are precious few sorcerers able to match me in might. Most of those that can tend to waste their talents in the unreliable impracticalities of precognition and prophecy. A tragic waste. Some say the best blades are those that are never drawn, and there is wisdom in such a philosophy. But power must be wielded, tested and trained, lest it wither on the vine.

  You have heard me speak of Ahriman before. I know you know his name, from his many predations upon the Imperium. My brother, my naïve but most admirably honest brother, Ahzek Ahriman once told me that he alone among the Nine Legions stood above me in talent with the Art. It was typical of his habit for blending humility with arrogance, to say nothing of manipulation.

  I cannot speak for the veracity of his words. In the long years of my life, while almost all of my sorcerous rivals lie dead, a few of them came close to killing me. There are others whom I would never wish to face, and still others that carry reputations equal to, or greater than, mine.

  In our Legion’s early years, I played my part as expected. My new duties for Abaddon required a breathtaking amount of preparation, and I adhered to these requirements with unfailing focus.

  I was never swift in my work. I was, however, very thorough. When Abaddon needed haste, he sent warriors or warships to do his will. When he needed precision, when he wanted a point made or a lesson learned, he sent me.

  When Abaddon first told me he required Daravek dead, I knew not to expect any deep conversational insight as to how he wished me to achieve his goal. It was always my place to study the target, to ascertain the consequences of various methods of death and to bring about a result most favourable to our emerging armies and the warrior-monarch that led us.

  Abaddon expects results. Any one of the Ezekarion requiring the painstaking force-feeding of information, unable or unwilling to compose battle plans in his own right, would be discarded or destroyed as useless. The same stands for the chieftains, sub­commanders and champions that fill the officer ranks beneath us.

  This serves a twofold purpose. First, although he leads the Black Legion’s greatest battles and oversees our function, in this ­manner Abaddon forces his ranking officers and elite bodyguards to constantly adapt and act on their own initiative.

  The second purpose, no less vital, is one of trust. By this delegation his closest brothers know they carry his trust. The rest of the Legion, and the entirety of the Eye itself, knows this as well. The Ezekarion speaks with Abaddon’s voice. Each one of us wields his authority. You cannot overstate the exultant effect this has on morale.

  It was my duty as Abaddon’s silent blade that brought me to the fortress of Thagus Daravek, Warlord of This, Master of That, Butcher of Them and a dozen other titles that I refuse to consign to parchment even all these millennia later. One of them mattered more than the others, and that is the one I shall use: the self-styled Lord of Hosts.

  He challenged us at every turn, a warlord who wanted to rival Abaddon, and thus he was sentenced to death. Our emissaries to other warlords would arrive only to find that oaths had already been sworn to Daravek. Our fleets would translate into a system only to sail into one of Daravek’s many ambushes.

  We of the Ezekarion, and the armies we commanded, had been bleeding the Legions for some time, carving them apart as we fought for our right to exist. None retaliated with the same ferocity as the Death Guard, and no warlord was as wilful, or as dangerous, as Daravek, the so-called Lord of Hosts. The title fit. On more than one occasion he had gathered fleets comprised of warbands from several Legions, tasked with the purpose of resisting our rise. Yet always he avoided direct conflict with Abaddon. Always he remained one step ahead of us, refusing to come within range of the Vengeful ­Spirit’s guns.

  For every victory we earned through the running blood of his warriors, he stole one back in kind. He had to die.

  I was Abaddon’s instrument. It took months of watching, waiting, hiding and scrying to locate his sanctuary world, and I was blessed with fortune as well. Traitors within his ranks stood ready to work with me. I could not fail. I would not fail. Not this time.

  Daravek and his warband laid claim to a world of calcified pain. Despite the madness of those words, they are neither weak poetry nor a strained metaphor. The planet’s crust was formed of tortured breaths, fearful dreams and the echoes of human and eldar agonies throughout eternity, all of it bleeding from the warp and rendered into a cold landscape of knuckly, misshapen bone.

  This would have left me enraptured during my first years inside the Eye. When I walked the world’s surface, however, I was neither breathless nor awed. My mind was elsewhere, tangled in other difficulties. This was my fifth attempt on Daravek’s life. As useful as I was to Abaddon, his patience was not without limit.

  ‘Kulrei’arah,’ Nefertari had informed me before I left to undertake the duty. That was the name this globe had once carried as part of the eldar empire.

  We had no name for it. It didn’t deserve one.

  If you touched the osseous ground with bare skin, you could feel the senseless, red reflections of the dreamers and sufferers whose torment formed this place. Even without touching the bony earth you could hear the murmurs rising from its cracked, marrow-stinking surface.

  What wracked imagination had conjured such a planet into being? Was this Daravek’s psyche at insidious work, shaping it to his desires? Or was it merely the Eye’s etheric discharge taking form – the warp’s excremental run-off changing a world without any guiding will?

  And yet, as daemon-haunted worlds are weighed, the climate and landscape of this nameless sphere were practically tame. On Sortiarius, the home world of my former Legion, it rains the boiling blood of every liar ever to draw breath. In the season of storms, this sanguine tempest is often acidic enough to dissolve ceramite. Some say this is Magnus the Red’s rebellious subconscious at play, scourging himself for his past treacheries. I cannot speak to the truth of the matter, but it sounds appropriate for my father, as conflicted as he is.

  Patches of this nameless world’s surface had, through preternatural corrosion or unrest, been reduced to deserts of bone dust. It was within one of these oceans of skeletal powder that Daravek’s fortress lay, half-buried in the dust of eroded nightmares. Its crooked spires reached skywards, surrounded in a fog of toxichemical mist. Monstrous industrial mouth-vents along the sides of each tower breathed the poison gas across the surrounding desert, offering yet another line of defence. Despite this, the bastion was still a place of pilgrimage­ to the beastmen and mutants that populated the world – their bodies, given over to varying degrees of rot, lay across the desert in their scattered thousands. This latter element fascinated me. What would bring these creatures on such a pilgrimage, into the face of an almost certain death? What did they believe awaited them within the fortress’ walls, those few that were strong enough to walk through the poison mist to reach it?

  I recovered several of the corpses for educational purposes. Speaking with the shards of their souls, I ascertained from their pious wailing that they left their subterranean tribes and marched upon Daravek’s castle of corroded iron in the hopes of elevatio
n into his ranks. He would hardly be the first to try and pervert the gene-seed implantation process to function on mutants, adult or otherwise, but tales of success in altering the Emperor’s original ritualised process were – and still are – as rare as you might imagine.

  After each summoning I would sheathe my jamdhara knife, hurl the shrieking ghosts back into the warp’s winds and incinerate the remains to erase any evidence of my investigations. Avoiding detection was paramount. Slowly, invisibly, I began my infiltration.

  It took almost a year of psychic permeation before I was ready to kill Daravek. Everything had to be precise. It had to be perfect. I could take no risks this time.

  I still wonder if I acted too swiftly.

  The creature’s name was a gathering of syllables that I would struggle to pronounce aloud, despite speaking several hundred linguistic variants of humanity’s proto-Gothic root tongue. This creature, whose thoughts were a turmoil of bestial instinct and slavering loyalty to its armoured masters, toiled its life away in the fortress’ dark depths. Here the only sounds in existence were the brays and yells of the menials raising their voices above the ceaseless crash of coal-fire machinery. This was the creature’s life, from birth to death.

  In this dark realm, the creature moved among its kindred, clutching a rusted and broken machine strut, almost two metres in length. It thrust this primitive spear through the back of a second creature’s neck, ripped it free, then wielded it as a club to shatter the face of a third slave. This third unfortunate fell to the ground, raising its arms futilely as it was impaled through the chest.