Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  And yet, I was laughing. Daravek was laughing. I had no power to compel him to such a reaction.

  Khayon. I spoke my own name, forcing my spirit into cohesion, keeping myself together. I am Khayon. I am Khayon.

  Memories flashed, acid-vile in their intensity, of warriors I had never met and wars I had never fought. Strangely it was this, of all things, that Daravek hated me for most. This voyeuristic sharing of his thoughts; this defiling insult of living inside his skull. And yet, even then, his snide laughter echoed all around me.

  He backhanded Ilyaster hard enough to shatter the other warrior’s breastplate and moved for the immense doors leading to the fortress’ teleportation chamber. I had to stop him. I had to kill him.

  But I could not. I could not hold myself inside his form. He would not let me. He hurled me from his flesh with the ease of a man waving aside an insect. My shock only made it easier for him to shed my consciousness from his own, and he did so with silent psychic laughter.

  Almost, Iskandar! Almost, this time.

  He repelled me with such brutality that all sense and sensation fled from me. I saw nothing, sensed nothing, and merely plunged through blackness. At the end of my strength, only oblivion awaited.

  For a time, I did not exist. For a time, I was past consciousness. In that deep and timeless black, I remember only one thing: when it began to end. There came the sensation of fangs, jaws that closed together in the nothingness. Weapon-teeth sank into whatever was left of Iskandar Khayon, biting down into the matter of his lost soul.

  Jaws that arrested my endless fall, that held me in a bladed, impaling embrace… and that brought me back.

  I woke with the arrhythmic drumming of my twin hearts straining inside my chest, and a gasp of bitter air spearing its way into my lungs. My vision returned, but slowly, victim to smears and hallucinatory blurs.

  When my muscles ceased spasming, I managed to rise on unsteady feet, appalled at the weakness of my limbs. Sweat greased my flesh in a disgusting coat. Blood had trickled from my eyes, my ears, my nose, my gums. The pressure in my skull began to ease as I sucked in great heaves of air, fuelling my locked lungs and overworked hearts.

  Nagual emerged from the shadow cast by my crouching form, licking blood from his obsidian teeth.

  Master? the daemon lynx asked, as if I were not standing right before him.

  Is it done? I was so drained, I could not be certain I was even reaching outside my own head, let alone to my distant daemon. Is he dead?

  The great cat turned back towards the burning fortress, kilometres away and far below us in the desert bowl.

  The prey fled. Could not kill alone. Had to save you, master. Your soul was lost.

  Breathless, exhausted, I exhaled into the nameless world’s reeking wind and looked up at the stars, where Thagus Daravek and his surviving brethren were surely safe aboard one of their warships, no doubt already sailing to yet another hidden sanctuary that would take me years to find.

  Defeated, a failure for the fifth time, I looked down at the lynx. I would go to the fortress and claim it for Abaddon. I would find out if Ilyaster still lived. And then, after this latest loss, I would go home.

  Among the Occluded Stars

  Abaddon was alone when I returned. He watched the smoke-wreathed stars as I approached him, looking out at the escort ships holding a perimeter around the flagship.

  We were hiding. The fleet – what little of it that I could see – lay at anchor in the very deepest nothingness, shrouded in a region of the Eye’s densest mists. The Vengeful Spirit was vulnerable, protected only by a clutch of destroyers, frigates and light cruisers.

  We were more fortunate than many other warbands. Abaddon has always seen value in sorcerers and recruited them to our cause by any means necessary. In a realm where Navigators are hopelessly lost to madness and so many warships sail only by hurling themselves into the tormented oceans and trusting the whims of the Pantheon to bring them into new hunting grounds, our vessels were guided by those gifted in the Art. Though far from a fail-safe method, use of sorcerous void-guides was the best – and indeed the only – way to keep our fleets in cohesion.

  My brother and I stood in one of the spinal observational spires overlooking the dark vista of the Vengeful Spirit’s backbone ­battlements. Outside of battle, he was often to be found here. As time had passed, as our armies had grown, as the assaults to steal the Vengeful Spirit had increased in number and intensity, Abaddon became evermore a warlord of the Eye rather than the simple, blunt instrument he had been as First Captain of the Sons of Horus.

  And yet.

  And yet Ezekyle himself diminished in ways few eyes outside the Ezekarion seemed to see. The malady that struck him burned slow in his blood, eating at him month after month. He grew distracted, insular, listless. The life in his golden eyes never faded; rather it seethed and turned sour. He had begun to grow apart from those of us he had brought together.

  He led us, still. His lapses and distractions had not yet threatened to compromise his leadership, but the more feverish and gaunter he grew, the more uneasy some of us in the Ezekarion became.

  Soon enough, he stopped sleeping. Sleep is rarely a concern for the warriors of the Legiones Astartes. We are able to subsist on mere hours of such healing rest each week, and we are capable of long periods without it entirely, albeit with a strain upon our physiologies. Yet Ezekyle claimed he no longer sought the respite of slumber at all. Instead he was almost always here between battles, staring out into the teeming half-dark between the Eye’s occluded stars.

  Sometimes I could almost sense what tore at his thoughts. Something? Someone? A presence, voiceless but far from silent, existed somewhere out there in the deeper dark. It called to him. Or threatened him. Or cursed at him. I could not tell.

  I could not tell if it was even real or simply some echo of his own aura, refracting across the infinite. To look into Ezekyle’s soul was always a matter of discomfort. He was but one man, alone and unbreakable, but his soul swirled with thousands of other voices forever pressing against his being. Was one of them stronger than the others? Was that what I was hearing?

  He had always refused to enlighten me, and nothing I could do ever pierced his aura. I wondered if he even heard the presences on a conscious level. He did not seem to. I confess that his distracted stoicism has always chilled me – the warp itself, the galaxy’s own reflection, cries for his attention and yet he resolutely ignores it.

  The pressures of such an existence must be beyond reason.

  The night I returned, he looked ravaged. We were alone but for my great lynx of shadow and obsidian, which prowled around the chamber, the fluxed heavens reflecting on the surface of his pearlescent eyes. I had not yet seen any of my brothers except Abaddon – most were away with the other fleets, fighting – and Ezekyle’s summons had come the moment my boots struck the Vengeful Spirit’s landing deck.

  Abaddon wore his battleplate – once the dark wargear of the Justaerin, though in the unreliable timelessness since the destruction of Horus Reborn he had already made several modifications. Another aspect that set Abaddon apart from many of our brothers was his refusal to rely on armourcraft slaves. Abaddon refused to let anyone tend to the maintenance and modification of his black war-plate. The trophies that hung from his armour were all those he had ­hammered into place himself. The trinkets and charms were those he had carved or fashioned. The repaired patches and sections of reinforcement were each done by his own hand. A legionary has no choice but to let machines and thralls aid in his armouring, when the ceramite plates must be mounted and driven and drilled into place, but that was the limit of Abaddon’s tolerance.

  He turned to me. Life seemed to pour back into his features.

  ‘Iskandar,’ he said. He was bathed in the light of the poisoned yet purified stars. Despite his throaty Cthonian drawl, he spoke my name with the Tizca
n pronunciation. I have always appreciated the gesture. ‘Back at long last.’

  ‘Where is the fleet?’ I asked. ‘Blood of the Gods, Ezekyle, we are practically alone in the void.’

  ‘Engaged elsewhere. Engaged several elsewheres, in fact.’ He related the whys and wheres of our forces. We were scattered to the warp’s winds, engaged in a dozen theatres of war at once. Falkus and his warband – the Aphotic Blade – were bringing destruction to Denarcus. Lheor and Zaidu were reinforcing Ceraxia at the Thylakus Expanse. Vortigern, Telemachon and Valicar were also prosecuting conflicts elsewhere. Our forces were divided as part of Abaddon’s endless ambitions, raiding some foes, negotiating with others – the endless and fragile cobweb of warfare and diplomacy was being woven even here in our warp-shaped prison, and the swiftest, hungriest of its weaving spiders was my golden-eyed lord.

  As he spoke, the Prosperine lynx padded to his side the way a tamed hab-feline would trail after its owner. Abaddon ran his unclawed fingers through the daemon’s spectral fur.

  ‘Nagual,’ he said in greeting.

  Nagual’s rumbling purr sent shivers through the deck. ‘I like this one far more,’ Abaddon continued. ‘It’s much more honest than your wolf ever was.’ I was not sure what he meant, and rather than let me reply, he gestured with the Talon to bid me begin my report.

  ‘My brother,’ I said, ‘Ilyaster Faylech and his brethren await your welcome.’

  ‘Good.’ Abaddon nodded, his bulky figure framed by the hazy void outside the observation deck’s blast windows. ‘And?’

  I went to one knee, a knight of yore before his liege lord. ‘And I failed you.’

  His breathing became a rumble, the promise of thunder to come. ‘Thagus Daravek still lives.’

  I did not think Ezekyle would kill me. I did not, however, expect to leave this encounter unscathed or unscarred. ‘He lives, lord.’

  ‘Is there some aspect of my leadership thus far, Khayon, that leads you to believe I look kindly upon failure?’

  ‘No, lord.’

  ‘And failure of this magnitude?’ he said slowly, opening and closing his clawed hand. ‘You are my blade, Khayon. What use is an ­assassin that cannot kill?’

  I almost shamed myself by arguing, insisting that Daravek represented my lone failure. While this was true, pleading the case would have been unforgivably pathetic.

  Abaddon rested a single claw point against my forehead. It would take a mere twist of his wrist to flay my face from my skull. I had seen him do it to others in the past. He wore the Talon almost all the time now. Rare were the encounters when one could address our overlord without the light of a distant sun or a chamber’s lumoglobes reflecting off the wicked scythes lengthening from his fingers. They scraped together with dry rasps when deactivated. They spat the unstable sparks of an ancient, arcane power field when alive. Horus had considered the Talon a symbol of his office as much as a tool of war. Abaddon considered it simply a weapon to be wielded, but he was not blind to the symbolism of wearing a trophy of that particular patricide.

  ‘Report,’ he said. ‘Tell me everything. And get up, fool. You are no knight, and I am no king. We are brothers here.’

  I rose as he lifted the Talon away, biting back my surprise. I could sense the anger burning off him the way a sun bleeds heat, but he seemed too weary to care.

  I looked at him closely for the first time since arriving. A subtle strain tautened his features. He looked more than unhealthy – he looked plagued. His deterioration during my absence was undeniable. I had to say something.

  ‘Ezekyle–’ I began, only for him to wave my concern away.

  ‘Report first.’

  I did as he commanded. I told him of my mission and of the preparations I had taken. I told him of the final night of battle and of the Death Guard defectors that Ilyaster – our wounded ally in Daravek’s ranks – had brought with him. I told him of the assets won and the number of foes destroyed. I told him of the desecrated bodies impaled upon the battlements that I had left in my wake: a lesson to warbands of the Nine Legions that our offers of alliance were to be taken as seriously as our threats of vengeance. And, last of all, I told him of the failed trap through which Thagus Daravek had fled.

  At the conclusion, Abaddon said nothing. He looked down at his Talon, the great claw closing and opening once more. Outside the observation deck’s blast windows, I could see the murky forms of several craft, a few of our own gravely depleted fleet at anchor within the malleable void of Eyespace. I couldn’t make out any details at this distance but I knew that – like the Vengeful Spirit and like our own ceramite – their hulls were black, darkened through psychic fire, atmospheric descent and the charring of battle damage. Black not simply to replace the colours that we had once worn, but to eclipse them. Black to acknowledge our shame. Black to symbolise freedom from the past, to declare our loyalty to none but ourselves.

  ‘I cannot do it,’ I finally said, breaking the uneasy silence.

  He chuckled as if I spoke in jest. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘I cannot kill him, Ezekyle. I have tried with every iota of my strength. I cannot do it.’

  Abaddon levelled his gaze to mine. ‘He is stronger than you?’

  ‘No.’ There was no need to lie. ‘No, he is not. I would feel that, and I would admit it, were it true.’ I trailed off, unable to explain it to either of our satisfaction.

  ‘You have returned to me in failure from a mission that you assured me, most zealously, was destined to succeed. I suggest you do better than stuttering half-answers through clenched teeth, Khayon.’

  ‘I cannot kill him,’ I said again. ‘When I try, he brushes me aside. It is like fighting the tide with nothing but shouted words. No matter how I hide myself, he senses my presence. No matter how I strike at him – subtle, slow, swift, vicious – he banishes my efforts.’

  ‘So he is stronger than you.’ Abaddon shook his head. ‘You Tizcans. When will you learn that there is no shame in admitting that others may know more than you, or possess greater strength?’

  I dared to step forwards, feeling my temper flare. ‘It is not a matter of strength. If it were, then he and I would fight, Ezekyle. We would be locked in a contest, one seeking to overpower the other. This is more than that. He laughs at my efforts. He throws me aside the way you would cast off a cloak. I have no answers, brother. I have never felt anything like it before.’

  I watched as he turned and walked away from me with a slow orchestra of grinding servo-joints. Once, this chamber had been an observatory. A place with no purpose in war, if such a thing can be countenanced on a Legiones Astartes flagship. A hololithic table stood in the centre of the room, damaged from previous battles but still functional. Abaddon used his free hand to trigger a prepared sequence of images. He called up hololiths of each of the vessels sworn to our cause; not merely the subfleet around the Vengeful Spirit, but the entirety of that to which Abaddon could lay claim.

  I stared at the visual litany spread before me in a vista of flickering light. This was more than a fleet. This was a Legion’s armada. We had come so far, yet we had so far still to travel. I suspect that looking at such signs of progress gave Abaddon comfort. I was content to see him distracted by anything that turned his anger from me, even this anaemic, hollow irritation that was far from the disappointed rage I had expected.

  ‘You must try again. No other warlord has as much of our blood on his hands as that Barbaran dog. Daravek must die.’

  ‘As you command, lord.’

  He laughed at my neutral reaction, and I was gratified to see even a flicker of his former charisma resurfacing. Yet he either sensed my thoughts or had grown adept at guessing them, for the smile swiftly passed.

  ‘You are watching me as if I may shatter into pieces. Enough of your useless worrying, Khayon.’

  Finally, he spoke of it. I would not let this chance pass.
‘You look weary past all endurance. Why do you not let me help you?’

  ‘Help me?’ The mirth in his eyes soured further. ‘I send you where you are needed, to do what must be done. You are my blade, brother, not my nursemaid.’

  ‘All of the Ezekarion can see that something is wrong within you, but I am the one that sees how deeply it has taken root. You are plagued by something, something I can almost see and hear myself, even as it hides in the warp’s winds. It grows stronger, its burden upon you heavier.’

  He realised then that I was not going to let this lie, as I had on all previous occasions. Perhaps I would have been content to trust him and refrain from pressing the matter had he not appeared so eroded and gaunt upon my most recent return.

  ‘This presence,’ he said slowly, and suddenly he looked hungry. Starved, even. ‘This voice that you sense – have you pursued it to its source?’

  ‘I have tried,’ I admitted. ‘A thousand times and more. There is nothing there. No source.’

  ‘Khayon.’ His voice was a growl, a low breath, a purred threat. It was a sound more suited to the jaws of a beast than to the mouth of a man. ‘You are overstepping your authority.’

  Ezekyle Abaddon is the consummate soldier, and he embodies everything that a warleader must be to thrive within the Empire of the Eye, but he is not without his flaws. One must always be careful when dealing with him. The wrath that makes him a warrior without peer boils beneath the surface of his skin at all times, ever ready to erupt. And his patience with me was scarce enough that night already.

  ‘I overstep nothing,’ I replied. ‘Speaking the truth to you is my duty, Ezekyle. Just as the Mournival once counselled Horus Lupercal.’

  He sneered at the mention of his primarch father’s informal and grotesquely insufficient guiding council. ‘The Mournival failed. I know that better than anyone, for I was part of it.’

  ‘It did,’ I agreed. ‘And you were. But I do not intend to let the same mistakes occur a second time. You were ignorant then, Ezekyle, and your place was to give counsel to a deluded fool. We are all far more than we were in that age of moronic optimism. What haunts you, brother? What is it that eats away at your psyche and soul?’