You might think, ignorantly but not unfairly, that Horus’ genetic samples alone would be enough for us to engineer an endless supply of the nineteen biosynthetic organs necessary for implantation to create Space Marines from human boy-children. This is not so, no matter any individual Apothecary’s genius. The Emperor himself envisioned the process, which speaks to the intellect required to first bring it into being, and put it into effect with the immense technological impetus of the Throneworld and its unprecedented access to relics of the Dark Age.
Even now in the Imperium, an Adeptus Astartes Chapter can be rendered slowly extinct by the theft of its gene-seed, despite its medicae-warriors possessing all the information and support necessary to re-engineer new progenoid glands and create new Space Marines. Indeed, such defilement is one of the Nine Legions’ preferred punishments; nothing drives a Chapter to such desperation, nor tars them with such shame, as the theft of their future.
And as for the Legions themselves? Would we raid our thin-blooded cousins and descendants in the Imperium if we could render new gene-seed organs with ease? Would we slaughter each other over fragments of lore or tithe fortunes in service and materiel to the Mechanicum’s daemon-forges if we could simply engineer miracles without their priceless expertise? We bind daemons into our war machines to keep them functioning. We forge new amalgamated horrors of daemonic flesh and cold metal to replace technology we can no longer maintain.
Remember this, for context is precious in the comprehension of this tale. For all that we mock the Imperium in the way you make a virtue of small-minded ignorance, we too have lost so very much. Perhaps even more. Your masters have sealed knowledge away from you, incinerated it, or it has been lost through the natural passage of time. We, on the other hand, have watched it slip through our fingers even when we tried to keep it close.
Nowhere exemplified this better than the shameful crypt on Maeleum.
One of the ghosts refused to disperse. It watched the three of us approaching, turning old, old eyes to each of us in turn. I felt the fall of its judging gaze upon me like a threat, a blade stroking against my armour. How long had it been here? Had it always been here, even when this sepulchre had been inhabited by the Warmaster’s deluded sons, only taking shape in the vacuum left by their absence?
The spirit was human, though its soul was boiling with the memories and emotions of accumulated centuries. Whoever it had been in life, it had witnessed sights and lived an existence far in excess of those allotted to a typical mortal span. Its form, that which we call a corpus when speaking of warp-born entities, was stable and unchanging. Its long hair was dark and ragged. Its skin, much like mine, was the dusky melange common among civilisations that rise in the equatorial regions of worlds like Terra. It wore a traveller’s cloak of faded black, and simple, travel-worn clothing. Tears stained its cheeks, tears of white ink; those four trails of sorrow were tattoos of tiny scripture from the corners of its eyes.
It was – or had been in life – an unmutated human female.
I reached for the warp ghost a dozen metres away, fingers curled as if to crush its throat with telekinesis. The air whirled with an unseen breeze in answer to the energy I summoned. The spirit’s hair trailed in the breeze.
Telemachon hesitated in his approach. I heard the fibre-bundle cords in his armoured collar purr as he tilted his head. Amurael halted a half-step after, looking between the apparition and the scanner display on his narthecium gauntlet. At my side, Nagual watched the spectre with glowing eyes, his jaws parted. Venom dripped from his sabre-teeth.
Khayon, came the whisper one last time, and the ghost smiled.
‘Iskandar Khayon,’ said the wraith, its voice completely human. ‘Telemachon Lyras. And Amurael Enka.’
I lowered my hand. The rising wind died. The three of us said nothing, confronted suddenly by a human woman where no living being had any right to be.
‘You will take me to Ezekyle Abaddon.’ She said it not as a command, but as if she were speaking of a memory. A memory that hadn’t yet happened.
‘And why would we do that?’ I asked.
‘Because I bring him a warning,’ she replied, perfectly calm, ‘and I will deliver him a future.’
Amurael and Telemachon merely stared at her. I was the one to ask the question on our tongues.
‘Who are you?’
She told us. She gave us a single name, though others would grant her many more titles across the years to come. And that was how I met Moriana, the Weeping Maiden, Oracle of the Despoiler, Prophetess of the Black Legion.
Vengeful Spirit
We brought Moriana before Abaddon – not as the messenger she claimed to be, but as the prisoner she truly was. She walked between two of my Rubricae, and no matter how prepared she was, she still flinched at the wall of sound that met us when we walked onto the bridge.
The fleet was at muster by the time we boarded the Vengeful Spirit. Even as we translated in-system, other vessels were breaking into the sanctuary of our nebula, engines running hot, seeking to fall into anchor formation around the flagship.
I heard Ashur-Kai’s voice long before I set foot on the Spirit.
I sense great unrest around you. His psychic tone was usually touched by his former role as my master, yet now it was discoloured by urgency and concern. Explain yourself, Sekhandur, he sent, using the variant of my name from its classical Gothic roots. Why are the tides of fate crashing against your soul?
As dramatic as ever. I should have realised he would sense Moriana’s presence the moment we translated in-system. We bring a captive from Maeleum.
That would explain the warp’s turmoil around your vessel.
We had been slowed on our return, true. I was not even close to being as gifted at navigating through the tumbling tides of Eyespace as Ashur-Kai was, though I had returned as swiftly as I was able.
You sound uneasy, my brother.
All is not well, Sekhandur. Lheorvine and Zaidu are about to kill one another, apportioning blame for their losses at Thylakus. Valicar, Ceraxia and Vortigern have returned bloodied by fleets sworn to Daravek. We encountered our own difficulties with his minions, as well. Can you not see the ship?
I could. On the oculus, the Vengeful Spirit was clawed prow to stern with superficial damage, the extent of which did not worry me; the simple presence of it did. It had been duelling vessels that were strong enough to break through its shields.
Tell me everything, I sent.
Just get to the command deck. I heard the age-old commanding tone of my former mentor in that order. You will see for yourself.
And so I did. A wall of sound, the uproar of rage and recrimination, washed over us as we entered the bridge. The bridge after a battle was usually a place of celebration and, not uncommonly, drunken or ecstatic torture of enemy warlords. Their corpses – or soon-to-be corpses – were hauled into place among the war banners hanging from the strategium’s roof, and warriors engaged in raucous contests of strength, vows of brotherhood or violent displays of adrenal joy to celebrate the victories that brought these new trophies.
I have been told that Imperial Space Marines sombrely reflect after their triumphs, kneeling in monastic reverence before statues of their idols and worshipping representations of their heroes – a somewhat different aesthetic to the pit fights, the howls and the cheers that follow our victories, where bragging is an art and a warrior’s reputation is all. Yet the sensation I walked into on the bridge that day was thicker, somehow fouler than usual. The frustration of hundreds of beaten warriors, their emotions meshing, created a psychic echo of their defeat that settled upon me like a funeral shroud.
Tokugra was the first to greet me. Ashur-Kai’s daemon-crow fluttered to alight upon my shoulder, regarding me with eyes that had seen stars born and die, and had shined with amusement all the while.
Boy, it greeted me.
I had not been ‘Boy’ to Ashur-Kai for centuries – the days of my adolescent apprenticeship were long past – but Tokugra referred to me by nothing else.
Nagual snarled at the crow. The two daemon familiars glared at one another in bestial dislike before, as ever, the crow took wing and put distance between itself and its warp-kin.
The command deck was alive with heaving bodies and shouting voices. Most of the activity centred around the raised dais where Abaddon’s throne sat unused. Warriors were yelling accusations and refutations, demanding answers from each other, and demanding that others heed their words.
‘Stay close to me,’ I told Moriana, and threaded the same command through the minds of the Rubricae that guarded her.
We passed beneath Ultio, the Anamnesis, in the chamber’s very heart. She turned gracefully in the pale azure fluid of her suspension tank. She was the calm heart of the storm, serene in her amniotic haven amidst the shouting masses. The cognition cables tendrilling from her head to the machinery atop her life-support prison swayed gently in the artificial womb-fluid, forming a serpentine crest where each industrial snake carried her thoughts throughout the ship’s receptive systems. The fluid was clean, constantly filtered and infused with nutrients by the humming machines set in the tall glass tank’s foundations.
She stared forwards, scarcely seeing with her eyes at all. Her vision was spread across the many thousands of gun-imagifiers and hull-scryers set along the Vengeful Spirit’s battlements. When she spoke, her mouth moved but produced no bubbles in the artificial womb-fluid. Her words intoned across the bridge with a voice not wholly unlike the way she had spoken before her immersion.
Sister, I sent to her.
‘Ezekyle,’ she said, the black stone vox-gargoyles in the chamber’s rafters calling out above the multitude. ‘Iskandar, Telemachon and Amurael have returned.’
In life, she had been Itzara, a young woman of Tizca. In death, she had first become the Anamnesis – machine-spirit at the heart of the warship Tlaloc – and then, gaining strength and identity upon fusion with a new vessel, she had become Ultio, the heart of the Vengeful Spirit. She was the ship itself, and its hull was an extension of her body, its armour plating her skin, its plasma reactors her organs.
She swirled a hand through the fluid of her tomb-cradle, not quite a wave of greeting. Her thoughts were a ceaseless process of trajectories, damage calculations and a deeply resonant awareness of the souls aboard the ship she commanded. It was painful to touch a mind like that for too long. Too inhuman.
Abaddon watched from the raised dais where his throne was set, though he considered the command throne to be little more than pageantry, sitting on it only when receiving emissaries or supplicants from other warbands.
Sargon intercepted me before I could reach the throne. He wore the blackened ceramite we all wore, though his was bedecked in tattered scrolls I had no intention of reading. The monkish surplice he wore over the battered power armour was pockmarked and war-torn, its painstakingly inked scripture ruined by scorch holes.
He looked young, barely more than a Legion initiate, his smooth skin the typical duskiness of those born and raised in the City of Grey Flowers on the long-lost desert world of Colchis. He had lacked vocal cords since long before I had met him, purportedly losing them to a cut throat in the Siege of the Imperial Palace. For several years he had relied exclusively on the hand gestures of Legiones Astartes battle-sign and using his simplistic psychic efforts to speak through the mouths of any nearby corpses.
Time had changed the method, if not the need. His shoulder guards were warp-fashioned things, horned daemonic faces of bio-ceramite leering from the armour plating, slavering bloody spittle, occasionally lashing their too-long tongues at the air. It was through these faces that he spoke, both voices in guttural harmony.
‘Iskandar,’ the two faces spoke. Neither of them looked at me – for reasons beyond me, both were always blindfolded with layers of chains. They licked their fanged teeth, chittering to themselves between words.
‘Sargon,’ I greeted him. ‘What is all this?’
‘Revenge,’ he said, leading me onwards. ‘The Gods have a sense of humour if this madness is anything to judge by. Half of our fleets limped back to the muster. Every captain and warlord brings the same tale – Legion resistance. Organised Legion resistance. Thagus Daravek took your latest attempt on his life personally.’
I said nothing, not wishing to speak yet again of my failure.
‘You should have killed him, Khayon.’ Sargon’s youthful features remained gentle as he gripped a howling female beastman by the back of the neck and hurled her out of the way. Her herd-kin scattered before our advance. ‘Worse,’ Sargon continued, ‘he savaged the War God’s Maw and the Shrieking Masquerade. Lheorvine blames Zaidu. Zaidu blames Lheorvine.’
I had no chance to answer. He blindly backhanded another crew member aside; the servitor toppled into those nearby, and we pushed through the crowd together, where most of the Ezekarion had gathered around Abaddon’s dais surrounded by dozens of their warriors. Here, the feeling of frustrated defeat blanketing the chamber reached its apex.
Zaidu was facing Lheor, ahead of baying packs of their men. Zaidu, bedecked in skulls on chains, his armour scraped bare of colour, was a clawed and avian malformation of a man. Taloned feet scratched the plasteel decking beneath him. The turbines on his back whined, powering up with his acidic thoughts. Every movement he made was a sudden jerk or a twitch, adding to the aura of ravenous energy he exuded.
The laughter through his sleek helm was a staccato croaking. ‘Your words, Firefist, they are a child’s puling wails.’
‘Don’t call me Firefist.’ Lheor’s dark, patchwork face showed rows of glinting metal teeth. Shivers ran through him, not a sign of fear but of physiological desecration and simple blood-need. The Nails were biting into his brain – he was struggling to keep control of himself.
Zaidu managed to cackle and growl at the same time, evidence of the mutation within his throat. ‘Your words,’ he said again, ‘they are the bleating of a weakling.’
Lheor roared, spit flying from his metal teeth. ‘I lost men because of this creature’s cowardice.’ He levelled his chainaxe at Zaidu, but his words were aimed at Abaddon. ‘We lost the battle because of this harpy. Let me kill him, Ezekyle.’
Abaddon stood halfway up the stairs leading to his throne. He looked gaunter than even when I had last seen him, his jaundiced features speckled with blood from who knew how many hours, days or weeks before.
‘Calm yourself,’ our overlord commanded with a tired sneer. Never had I seen him look so exhausted. ‘You’re frothing at the mouth, Lheorvine.’
‘I want his head!’
Zaidu’s reply was a laughing screech that had all the charm and humanity of talons raking over sheet metal. ‘The Masquerade did all that was asked of us, Lord Abaddon. Firefist’s warriors failed to hold their lines. The War God’s Maw, they are weak. Daravek’s men killed them before we could reach them.’
Lheor drew his hand back, ready to slam his axe blade into the deck.
No! I sent in an urgent blade of psychic warning. To drive a weapon into the ground before a brother was to initiate a blood challenge – a Cthonian gang ritual that Abaddon had allowed, even encouraged, to spread through our warbands.
Lheor’s face twitched as his cranial implants reacted with boiling heat to the unwanted pressure of my silent voice in his mind, but it was enough to force a moment’s hesitation. He lowered the blade. The watching crowd bayed their disappointment.
Telemachon shoved past me, moving to Zaidu’s side, and the jeers turned at once to cheers. The crowd scented blood now.
‘Say nothing more, brother,’ Telemachon ordered his lieutenant. ‘Let’s cut to the truth, shall we?’
Zaidu immediately nodded in wordless compliance, remaining at his lord’s side. Lheor
looked between the two of them, still straining to hold himself back with the leash of Abaddon’s wishes.
‘Lyras.’ Lheor made the name an accusing growl. ‘Your dog cost us the battle at the Thylakus Expanse.’
Zaidu indeed said nothing, at least not aloud. I could hear the faint click of vox-relays from his helm, as well as Telemachon’s.
‘In my absence, Subcommander Vorolas is invested with my full authority,’ Telemachon said calmly. His aura rippled with the first stirrings of excitement, of anticipation finally ripening.
Lheor kept his eyes on Telemachon. ‘We have pict-feeds, gun imagifiers, vox archives and sworn oaths that stand testament to your bastard subcommander failing to reinforce us and leaving my vanguard to die.’
Ah, how familiar, I thought, though my blood was running cold. I did not like the prickling amusement radiating from Zaidu. It was a piss-stain of smug satisfaction souring his aura. This unfortunate scene had the ripe stink of premeditation.
‘I understand your displeasure,’ Telemachon replied, as reasonably as I had ever heard him sound. ‘And I trust Subcommander Vorolas’ account differs from yours?’
Zaidu twitched one shoulder, followed by a tic-jerk of his head. ‘We fought to get to them, Lord Lyras. How we fought! But the War God’s Maw, they know nothing of tactics. They cannot hold to a battle plan. They advanced too far, too fast. Firefist’s men, they were already taking savage losses by the time we reached them.’
Lheor’s response to this was, by his standards, rather calm. He spat onto the deck before Zaidu’s boots, the acid eating through the metal floor.
‘You’re a liar, Zaidu.’ Lheor followed the disrespectful gobbet with more accusations. ‘A liar, a coward and your word isn’t worth a damn here. I am Lheor of the Ezekarion, and I say you lie.’
He looked to Abaddon for support, but none came. I stared at Abaddon’s passivity – and in that moment, the die was cast. Lheor threw his axe. It hammered into the deck before Zaidu’s boots. The Raptor cackled his nasty excuse for laughter.
Black Legion Page 10