What deal was struck? he sent to me.
I pulsed my memories of just what had happened. Ashur-Kai sifted through the scene in the wastelands of the craftworld, his own thoughts growing colder.
I do not know what Abaddon’s offer entails, he admitted. It could be anything at all.
I said nothing. Unease serpentined its cold and greasy way through me.
Abaddon marched to the central dais. ‘Ultio, report.’
The Anamnesis did not need to watch the oculus – her attention was spread throughout the ship’s bones and gun-imagifiers – yet she stared at the oval screen with particular intensity.
‘I sense presences aboard,’ she said, sounding confused and distant.
‘Report on the enemy fleet,’ Abaddon clarified, eyes narrowing as he gazed upon the oculus himself. He sat in the command throne with an ungainly growling of Terminator armour joints. I shared a glance with Telemachon. Outside of negotiating with other warbands, our lord only ever occupied Horus’ throne when gripped by irritation or fury. This seemed to be both.
‘Ezekyle…’ Ultio said, her confusion deepening, making her sound somehow younger. ‘They… They are taking my crew.’
‘I want you concentrating on Daravek’s armada. Are they moving? What formations are they adopting? Focus, damn you.’
It was the first time I had seen her openly failing to heed his orders. ‘I hear the same loss across the fleet in the voices of the armada’s captains. These presences are leeching lives from our crews.’
Abaddon hammered his fist against the arm of his throne. ‘Ultio. I know what is happening. It’s happening by my will. Now focus on what matters.’
Her eyelids flickered several times, evidence of immense cognitive processing taking place inside her gestalt mind. A moment later she swirled in her fluid, coming back to herself.
‘Thagus Daravek’s fleet is advancing,’ she said.
Abaddon heaved a breath. ‘Battle stations.’
‘That will not be necessary,’ Saronos said, from his place at the side of Abaddon’s throne. ‘We will guide you from here before they can engage you. But first, there is the matter of payment.’
We never learned the exact cost. There was no way we could, for no officer in the fleet truly knew the scale of the human communities dwelling within the bowels of their warships. Slaves bred other slaves, dregs bred other dregs, regiments of thrall-soldiers – the Lost and the Damned, you might say – merged and blended and split apart, all away from the eyes of their Black Legion masters. Some of our warbands enforced rigid discipline upon their human and mutant soldiers, while others threw them into war as a ragged tide and paid them no mind between battles. The same as any other vessel, the Vengeful Spirit was home to tens of thousands of unknown, unlisted humans eking out a living in the deeper decks.
In truth, we only descended into those levels for two reasons: to stir the rabble into a frenzy before deploying them as bolt fodder, or – far more rarely – harvesting their ranks for male children who would make viable candidates for ascension into our ranks. But we lacked the functioning resources to devote any real efforts to that process. There was no true recruitment, only stasis and slow depletion.
Our new allies, however, suffered no such limitation.
When Abaddon made his offer to Saronos, he had laid his ambition bare. He would escape the Eye, no matter the price.
How many children were taken from the benighted cities that spread throughout our warships’ bellies? How many families living in those tribal clans and blighted depths cursed our allies for the theft of their young? These miserable questions have no answer. I suspect, however, that they took the children with the most promising souls first. The ones that would, in time, bloom with psychic strength. Not all, of course. But many. So very many.
And I suspect this not because of some misguided concern over their cruelty. No, I believe it is true purely because of what Abaddon offered them when he made his great gamble and threw his ambitions bare before us. His exact words were what mattered.
Saronos had watched my lord’s approach. ‘What do you offer, Ezekyle Abaddon?’
Abaddon had replied with only three words.
‘Whatever you need.’
Saronos moved among us now, a grey figure amidst the ragged hordes of bridge crew. His red eye-lenses tracked left and right as his gaze lingered on the warriors present, drifting over the mutants and humans. He made his way across the command deck, all while our holds were being drained of potential recruits, the actions of the spectral Space Marines unopposed by anyone but the screaming parents of the stolen children. Their resistance was as useless as you can imagine. I am sure that unarmed hands scraped uselessly against grey ceramite, and that plaintive cries fell on deaf ears. The Warp Ghosts took what they had come for.
But that was not all they came for. Abaddon had promised a sacrifice, and offered them whatever they needed. This, they took.
‘Ezekyle,’ Ultio called down from her raised tank. ‘The Abyssal Shadow reports that their void-seer is…’
She trailed off, looking up, lifting her gaze to the navigational balcony at the apex of the bridge’s ornate architecture. Our gazes followed.
Three grey figures materialised out of the dark air, their dirty armour seeming to eat the sick half-light of the illumination globes as they advanced on Ashur-Kai.
I want to tell you that I had not expected this when Abaddon made his dreadful gamble. I want to say that I fought for my former mentor, that I opposed Abaddon’s sacrificial offering and the bond between Ashur-Kai and I holds fast to this day. That would make for a pleasing beat in the song of this long saga: that despite losing so many brothers over the centuries, my oldest companion – the scholar that first taught me the rudiments of sorcery – remains by my side to the very last.
I want to tell you that I did not stand by, doing nothing but playing my part in his betrayal.
But I promised that every word on these pages would be true.
The truth is that I drew my sword. The truth is that I stepped forwards, my gaze raised, and called Ashur-Kai’s name across the teeming bridge.
Boosters flared nearby. Telemachon and Zaidu struck the deck before me, rising from their swift landings and barring my way, blades in their hands. The Masqued Prince was silent, his facemask impassive and beautiful. Zaidu growled a wet, snarling laugh, a warning sound from the throat of a beast.
Yet it was Ashur-Kai that stopped me. Not Telemachon and Zaidu’s needless posturing, nor even Abaddon’s cold scowl at my reaction. It was Ashur-Kai, raising a hand to ward me away.
I should have guessed, he sent to me. What else would the ferrymen of the damned need? His silent voice was raw with icy, amused revelation. This is their life. Their entire existence. They need more ferrymen.
I felt him send a telepathic command to his Rubricae, commanding them to lower their weapons. They did so at once.
This is not brotherhood, I sent the words as a blade, knowing Abaddon would hear them.
Wrong again, boy, said Ashur-Kai, with the informal title he had not used in centuries. This is a sacrifice for a greater cause. It is the very essence of brotherhood.
One of the grey warriors placed a hand on Ashur-Kai’s shoulder. Another drew a curved dagger, its blade scratched with unreadable runes. He rested it under Ashur-Kai’s white chin, its tip seemingly ready to plunge upwards through the jaw and into my first tutor’s brain.
I could sense the Warp Ghosts speaking to him, but I heard nothing of their words and detected none of their meaning. Ashur-Kai closed his albino eyes and, barely perceptibly, he nodded.
If we fight them… I sent to him.
Then the fleet dies.
Amurael was at my side as well. Partly, I thought, to lend support against Telemachon and Zaidu, and partly to prevent me doing anything foolish that w
ould antagonise the Shrieking Masquerade’s commanders. He certainly bore no love for either of them beyond fraternal loyalty.
Nagual prowled to stand at my other side. I calmed him with a reluctant sending, telling him it was over.
I was wrong, however. Someone had yet to voice her say on the matter.
Ultio was still watching the theft of the sorcerer responsible for guiding her through the warp. In a move of near-flawless unity, every enthralled cyborg and war robot of the Syntagma across the bridge raised their weapons and aimed their shoulder cannons at the grey warriors in our midst.
‘You are not taking him,’ the Anamnesis stated. The lumoglobes flickered brighter, a sign of her rising temper. ‘He belongs to the Vengeful Spirit. He is mine.’
Abaddon’s eyes glittered. I could read the surprise there, subtle as it was. He had not expected this.
Moriana dared to raise her voice against the ship’s heart, only for one of the Castellax robots to whirl on her in a grinding chorus of gear joints. Both of its industrial claws opened, like the threatening maws of iron dragons. Flame-projectors mounted on both forearms hissed, their pilot lights lit, ready to bathe her in twin gouts of alchemical fire.
‘You will shut your mouth on my bridge,’ Ultio told the prophetess. ‘Save your poison for other ears.’ Ultio did not deign to look at her; the Anamnesis kept her gaze fixed upon the navigational balcony. ‘Grey Ones,’ she called to Saronos’ warriors. ‘Behold your fleet.’
The entire ship shivered, coming alive, rolling in the storm’s silence. We could feel the Vengeful Spirit’s gun decks rumbling as its city-killing cannons realigned, no longer locked on Daravek’s distant fleet. Instead, they trained their lethal aim on the grey ships of our new allies.
‘Ultio, enough of this,’ Abaddon ordered her.
Was the ship’s ancient machine-spirit at war with the new soul that claimed the vessel? I do not know. I know that Ultio hesitated – she was Abaddon’s creature through and through now, despite her origins. When he spoke, she listened. When he commanded, she obeyed. But not this time.
‘Release him,’ she ordered the Warp Ghosts. ‘Or I will reduce your weakling fleet to dust.’
This was the first time any of us had witnessed the potential reaches of Ultio’s true autonomy. In time she would grow both more powerful and more unstable, as the hearts of our warships were prone to do through warp exposure. By the time we constructed our ultimate flagship, the Krukal’Righ – what the Imperium calls the Planet Killer – she would be unrecognisable as the once-serene machine-spirit of the long-dead Tlaloc. Here and now, as she turned her ire upon the intruders threatening Ashur-Kai, she made her first independent stand.
‘Eleven of my ships report the theft of their void-guides. I am willing to accept their loss as part of the Black Legion’s offer. But you will release my sorcerer at once if you value the existence of that insignificant flotilla you call a fleet.’
Saronos turned to Ezekyle. ‘Does the Black Legion choose to break the pact?’
Righteousness blazed in Ultio’s eyes as she answered for our lord. ‘Take another soul. Not him. Then the pact stands.’
I believe I sensed Abaddon’s unease in that moment. With my lord, I could never be sure what was imagination or projection. He guarded himself too well, or he was guarded too well by the powers that increasingly hungered for his attention.
‘The terms have already been agreed,’ Saronos calmly intoned. They were almost his last words. Three of the Thallaxi cyborgs stalked towards him, ready to lance him through with ionised las-beams. Their lightning guns would cut him apart at close range.
I wondered whether in death Saronos would look any different from the rest of us. Whether, in fact, he had ever been human. He remained both alive and dead to my senses.
‘Let him go,’ Ultio repeated to the three Warp Ghosts still surrounding Ashur-Kai.
The Warp Ghosts raised their weapons. We raised ours. Everything was a half-moment from erupting into madness. I never learned if Abaddon was going to acquiesce to Ultio’s will or not, for it was Ashur-Kai who spoke, his voice strained with the blade under his chin.
‘Itzara,’ he said quietly. He used her human name, who she had been before the surgical internment that had saved her life and changed her completely. ‘The Gods orchestrated this drama, dear girl. Sometimes we must play our part in their traps, letting them sink their teeth into our souls, for the chance to fight another day.’
She stared up at him – resolute, unblinking, somehow both ardent and passionless, just as always. ‘I will not allow this.’
Something passed between them, some telepathic exchange. It took only a moment, but there was no way to know the depths of that silent conversation. Telepathy allows you to convey a lifetime of meaning within the span of a single blink. I sensed the wordless flow of communication between them, and then Ultio’s attention drifted, turning away, resting upon me.
‘You are right, Ashur-Kai,’ she said.
What did you tell her? I sent to Ashur-Kai. What did you say?
He met those words with silence. Meanwhile the ship’s guns unlocked from tracking the Warp Ghosts vessels. The Vengeful Spirit rolled once more, bringing itself back to face Daravek’s encroaching armada. Ultio turned with the ship, facing the oculus once more. Her refusal to speak anything more was a bitter shroud that she wore with pride.
Abaddon had watched all of this with a calm that boiled my blood. I shook Zaidu’s clawed hand from my armour and looked to my lord.
I want you to remember this moment, my Imperial hosts, when I speak of Abaddon in the future. When I speak of the ways in which he excels militarily, or shows the gifts of truly charismatic leaders. I want you remember the pact he made with the Ghosts of the Warp, and the way he gestured with the Talon’s scythe blades, indicating Ashur-Kai. My former mentor. One of the Black Legion’s founders. One of Abaddon’s own irreplaceable Ezekarion. The void-guide for the flagship of the fleet.
Remember this, as a display of the depths of Abaddon’s ruthlessness. Some of you may see it as a virtue. Others as a failing. I cannot speak for you. But I want you to remember it, for it is part of who he is.
Ezekyle met Ashur-Kai’s eyes, just for a moment. It was all that passed between them as a farewell.
‘Take him.’
Early in my apprenticeship to Ashur-Kai, when I was a youth in one of the many Thousand Sons fleets, my mentor often pointed out my tendency to focus on the details to the exclusion of the wider picture. In the hours that followed his sacrifice, there are two aspects that cling to my memory with a clarity that would have vindicated Ashur-Kai’s lecturing soul no end. My recollection of that flight should be meticulous in its detail. Instead, I find myself focusing on the aftermath of Ashur-Kai’s vanishing.
The first thing to happen was immediate, yet noticed by almost no one else. Across the bridge, the nine Rubricae bound to Ashur-Kai’s will were severed almost instantly from his control. I felt the psychic strands thinning, then give way with silent snaps. The nine warriors did not move. They remained as they were, their archaic and ornate boltguns held to their chests, inactive sentinels watching over the command deck and waiting for a sorcerer’s commands. Now unbound, they were receptive to the authority of whomever would claim them.
We had other sorcerers among our ranks – some powerful, some lesser, and many capable of commanding Rubricae. I was reluctant to let the ashen dead that had belonged to my former mentor simply serve elsewhere, however. They had once been my own brothers, the warriors of the company I had captained.
It had been Ashur-Kai’s personal preference to have his slaves artfully paint his automata guardians in the traditional Tizcan red of the Thousand Sons from before the rebellion. Their shoulder guards showed their true allegiance, however, cast in the black and gold of our new Legion. It was a striking image, and I had always wondered as
to the spiritual significance behind the gesture. Far more commonly, our sorcerers left their Rubricae in the blue of the Thousand Sons, marking with them a single Black Legion pauldron, or they recast them entirely in the black and gold worn by all other warriors beneath our banner. I favoured the latter. In certain lights, you could see the warp-wrought blue of the Thousand Sons turbulent beneath the surface of the black, as though trying to stain its way back into being.
I turned to those crimson echoes of a long-lost past, reaching out to them with a psychic clutch I have become all too familiar with across the years.
I am Khayon, I told them.
Every one of them turned to me, some needing to look up from their places in the crew console pits, others looking down from the overhead gantries.
All is dust, they sent back, devoid of personality and life, hollow but for their lethality and obedience. Later, I would claim them, binding them to me. Later. Once I could bear to look at them for more than a few moments.
The second incident occurred when I was in my private sanctum, duelling with Nefertari, training to adapt to the cybernetic arm that Ceraxia’s tech-priests had fitted. Days had passed, or perhaps weeks, in the timeless vagaries of Eyespace.
The arm had taken well, fusing to my flesh and offering the same strength as that I had grown used to all my life. Ceraxia had forged it herself, a fact that honoured me deeply, and from the elbow down my new arm was a contoured limb of burnished gold, shaped to match what I had lost. I had expected to be able to regenerate the original flesh through psychic manipulation, yet failed with each attempt. The flesh and bone refused to reform.
Ceraxia’s artistry, then, was my only real choice. I regained the use of my arm, and slowly accustomed myself to the strangely dull sensations of its metal surface-sensors.
It was during one of our regular sparring bouts that Nefertari asked to look at the limb, amused at the engineering once I let her do so. She rarely touched me. We disgusted each other physically – she revolted me with her elongated, liquid alien otherness; I revolted her with my human crudeness and sloth, as well as with the corruption she so often pointed out was running through my veins.
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