Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

The tide would turn in one tunnel, only for another squad of black knights to meet us at the next junction or around the next corner.

  I remained peripherally aware of the Vengeful Spirit around me, shivering and shaking as the other battle raged. I could make out Lheor’s murmurs as he relayed orders to the Riven and his own squads from the War God’s Maw.

  Riding Amurael’s mind was exchanging one sense of helplessness for another, but at least aboard the Eternal Crusader I was with my brethren and could be of some use to them.

  Amurael called his racing, bleeding squad to halt. Several of them actually obeyed.

  What is it? I sent to him, speaking within the mist of his senses. His thoughts were a furious stream of consciousness in the near darkness of the Eternal Crusader’s repetitive corridors.

  Scanner. Need my auspex. The fighting is unreal. Gods, these bastards can fight! We’re falling behind Abaddon.

  You are not behind. You are ahead of almost every other assault force. Only Telemachon and the Shrieking Masquerade are ahead of you.

  How do you know? he asked. Where is Abaddon?

  He is embattled in the secondary starboard colonnades, I replied. His boarding pods took suppressive fire on approach, so he is fighting undermanned. And I know because I know where all of you are. I can hear the songs of your thoughts even over this distance.

  Where is Telemachon? I have to link up with him, and he’s refusing to answer the vox.

  I resisted the urge to laugh, which was no easy feat. Telemachon seeks the glory of slaying Sigismund alone. He will not come back for you, Amurael – he is thinking of nothing but casting the Black Knight’s severed head at Abaddon’s feet as a gift for our lord. Move west and regroup with any of your sergeants still able to follow orders. There is a concourse not far from here that leads to the spinal tributaries.

  Amurael spat acid onto the deck. Thank you, brother. You should be here, Khayon. I could use you at my side.

  I wanted nothing more than to be there, instead of bloodlessly watching from afar as our Legion won its first victory against the Imperium.

  Abaddon cannot trust me. Not after Daravek.

  Perhaps, he agreed, too easily for my tastes.

  Amurael moved again. I slipped free of his thoughts and opened my eyes. Ultio was screaming. It took me a moment to realise it was a cry not of rage, but of pain.

  Blood stringed through the fluid of her suspension tank. The cables that crowned her, binding her skull to the logic engines at the top of her life-tomb, were tangled and leaking coppery oil. Psy-stigmata showed in an ugly patchwork across her skin – some of it taking the form of cuts and rents, others showing as bruises.

  As weariness descended upon her, or as pain crept across her thoughts, her control over the vessel slipped. This was nothing I had not seen many times before: the Anamnesis forced to speak orders to the command deck crew instead of relying entirely on her control as the ship’s machine-spirit. She was doing so now, maintaining a barrage of clear, concise orders.

  ‘…eighty degrees portside yaw, accelerating at once. Fighters and bombers to flock to the Falkata as we come about. Formulate attack runs against its defensive broadsides. Shields failing in thirty to ten seconds. Begin the siphon of plasmic conduction to relight the shields. Starboard fore-gunner decks, be ready to fire in twelve seconds. Target the Ophidian Gulf as it passes through our firing solution – shatter its shields and vox the Ecstasy of Fire with orders to chase it down. Prepare the ultima torpedo array for vortex lock upon the Prideclad when we shift to the fourth subquadrant. Shields failing in twenty-five to five seconds. Brace for inevitable bombardment as the shields fall… There. The Arcus and the Sword of Sigismund are bringing lances to bear – brace for impact, brace, brace…’

  When the shields fell, they fell with a seismic sound wave that jarred the Vengeful Spirit to its industrial bones. The shuddering intensified as weapons struck the naked hull with impunity, yet Ultio – bleeding and bruised – was immersed in the killing fields before her. The ship banked and rolled with her will, or moved at her command when her will was no longer sufficient. Impacts rained against us. Our weapons spat back. Beastmen roared around me.

  Lheor abandoned his console and shouted for his arming slaves. Saliva had formed a sheen on his chin, and by the light of his bloodshot eyes, it would not be long before he lost himself to the Nails.

  ‘Boarders from the Blade of the Seventh Son. They’ve gained the primus tributaries.’ That was dangerously close to the bridge, and though the Riven were scattered across the ship, it was the War God’s Maw that held the sectors around the command deck. Lheor was going to join his warriors.

  Three heavily augmented beastmen, from Lheor’s ruddy-furred Khorngor clans, brought his heavy bolter and ammunition feeds. Another carried his chainaxe, and yet another bore his helmet. Lheor tore the weapons from their clawed hands and leaned forwards for the last of the beastmen to affix his crested helm in place.

  ‘May the God of War be with you,’ I said, not without an edge of sarcasm. His eye-lenses glowed as his helmet seals locked, and he hefted the brutal cannon he favoured no matter the battlefield.

  ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I smiled. ‘Good hunting, brother.’

  ‘Don’t lose the battle while I’m gone,’ he said, as if I had anything to do with Ultio’s talents in the art of war. I could give her orders, but she needed none. This was her arena, not mine.

  Lheor summoned the handful of his warriors present on the bridge and led them into the corridors that formed the Vengeful Spirit’s veins. I briefly listened to the clicking vox chatter as he rallied several of his squads on the way. It synergised, in a way, with Ultio’s stream of orders and the shivering thunder impacting upon the hull: a perfect storm of sound.

  I turned back to the oculus as the cruiser Arcus, once of the Imperial Fists warfleet and now of the Black Templars armada, detonated in our wake.

  At the heart of the braying beastman herds and a world of dark steel shaking around me, I seated myself on Abaddon’s throne, eyes half-lidded with the onset of a meditative trance as I watched the Black Legion’s fate playing out before me.

  Time passed.

  Lives ended.

  Warships died.

  I watched fire tear through pressurised sanctuaries and cease to exist once it kissed the void. I watched the blazes slough the flesh from bones, before breaking those bones down to ash. I watched ­torpedoes streak and swerve and drill and detonate. I watched lance beams carve through consecrated armour that had endured the tides of hell itself. I watched ships full of my brothers crumble in ruin, populations of the mutated and the mad sucked in corpse-falls from sundered hulls. I watched vessels that had anchored proudly in the skies above Terra now dying in droves, as Sigismund’s sons were reduced from an armada to a fleet, and from a fleet to scattered formations.

  I watched it all. It was art.

  I listened to my brothers shrieking and killing and dying. I listened to my cousins, those still loyal to the Throne, roaring and bleeding out and spending their final breaths on foul oaths that cursed us and mocked us for our treachery. I listened to Ultio’s endless orders, not only to the crew but to her Syntagma war robots and cyborgs, directing them to stand with the Riven and the War God’s Maw. I listened to the grind of straining metal and the thunder of guns that could – and had – killed cities. I listened to the sirens and the screams and the mechanical pulses of my armour’s biosign systems.

  I listened to it all. It was music.

  I sensed the spillage of souls into the warp. I sensed the outburst of panicked, confused, blood-maddened, death-drunk spirits of the violently slain, tumbling into the realm behind reality. I sensed the wet laughter of gorging daemons. I sensed the ebb and flow of the empyrean’s winds, blowing harder behind the veil, fuelled by the glut of freed souls. I sensed d
eath after death after death – those who did not know they were dead; those that fought uselessly as they fell into the waiting, gaping maws; those that cried wordless defiance as they were torn apart by daemonic claws. I sensed the daemons that would be born in the aftermath of this battle. I sensed how they loved us for this slaughter, and how they hated us for its mortal limits – for no ­matter the slaughter we perpetrated, it was never enough, never enough.

  I sensed it all. It was beautiful. Hatefully beautiful.

  And, last of all, I felt when Abaddon reached Sigismund.

  I felt the moment’s curious formality, and felt the searing emotions in my lord’s twinned hearts. I felt the vindication of glory to be earned. I felt the thwarted fury of a man forced towards a fate he did not, yet, adore.

  I closed my eyes, leaving the rolling, burning, fighting Vengeful Spirit behind.

  When I opened them, Sigismund sat enthroned before me.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘you have returned.’

  Hammer and Anvil

  He burned with life. It seared through his veins. The righteousness of his cause haloed him, bathing him in the corona of a faith that was wholly unreligious, but faith nevertheless. I stared up at him beyond the ranks of his huscarls, those warriors who we would learn in later wars were called Sword Brethren, and I realised then just how it was that Sigismund still lived even after all this time. He had survived for a thousand years because he refused to die. He hated us too much to sleep in his grave with his duty undone.

  Sigismund watched us through the chamber’s surreal calm. Blood marked his armour and tabard, medals of honour earned from the Black Legion bodies spread across the hall of white marble and black iron. He had not been idle in defence of his ship. It seemed he had chosen this chamber of reverence as a place to make his final stand.

  ‘So, you have returned.’ He spoke to all of us, his voice ancient but uncracked. ‘I never doubted you would.’

  His Sword Brethren were battered, bloody and exhausted. Our warriors facing him were no different. Several were still breathless and bleeding, their wounds scabbing over even now with the effects of their gene-wrought organs.

  Abaddon was filthy with gore. The souls of those he had slaughtered to reach this chamber circled him, unseen and silent, a halo of smoky misery trailing away into nothingness as the warp pulled them into the oblivion of its maw.

  Sigismund rose. He held the sword of his office, what the Imperium knows as the Sword of the High Marshals. The Black Sword, his favoured weapon for so many centuries, was sheathed at his hip. The straightness of his back and the power within his posture surprised me, though the dozens of my dead brothers spread across the deck should have dissuaded me of any illusions that Sigismund would be enfeebled by age. He had carved his way through several of the Shrieking Masquerade, although, looking through Amurael’s eyes, I did not see Telemachon or Zaidu among the slain.

  Abaddon stepped forwards to meet him and gestured at us to lower our weapons. Sigismund did the same to his men. Both commanders were immediately obeyed, and the insane serenity stretched on while the Eternal Crusader shuddered and burned around us. The oculus, I noted, was tuned to watch the Vengeful Spirit. Our flagship rolled in the void, streaming fire and ice and air from her wounds, her cannons screaming silently into the darkness. She was duelling several smaller vessels, twisting to them each in turn, cutting them apart methodically with lance volleys that streamed through space, bright as the arcing flares of Terra’s sun.

  There was a shiver of disorientation as I witnessed the burning ship where my body sat in Abaddon’s throne, so distant from where I watched behind Amurael’s eyes. That sense of dislocation did not last long. Adapting to such sensory perceptions was an elementary aspect in the principles of Tizcan meditation; I was taught the techniques before my eighth birthday.

  Abaddon addressed the approaching knight. ‘I see time has blackened your armour, as it has ours.’

  Sigismund stopped within blade reach, but neither of them lifted their weapons. ‘I looked for you,’ he said to my lord, ‘as Terra burned in the fires of your father’s heresy. I hunted for you, day and night. Always lesser men blocked my way. Always they died so that you might live. But I have never stopped searching for you, Ezekyle. Not through all these long years.’

  Abaddon’s rage, ever his greatest weapon and most crucial flaw, had deserted him. I watched him through Amurael’s eyes, and he looked ravaged.

  ‘Don’t make me do this,’ Abaddon said. ‘Don’t make me kill you.’

  He even cast his sword down with a crash of iron, such was his passion. ‘You cannot have lived all of these centuries and seen nothing of the truth, Sigismund. The Imperium is ours. We fought for it. We built it with blood and sweat and wrath. We forged it with the worlds we took. The empire is built upon foundations of our brothers’ bones.’

  The old knight stared impassively. ‘You lost the right to speak for the Imperium when you brought it to its knees. If you loved it as ardently as you claim, Ezekyle, you would not have pushed it to the brink of ruin.’

  My lord overshadowed Sigismund, standing far taller in his Terminator plate. He gestured to the warriors around the room, taking them in with a single sweep of the Talon; they were all in black, though fighting on different sides.

  ‘We are the Emperor’s angels.’ It horrified me to hear the dark kindness in Abaddon’s tone. When he needed his wrath more than ever, he was trying to reason with the one Space Marine that could never be reasoned with. ‘We didn’t rebel out of petty spite, Sigismund. We rebelled because our lord and master played us false. We were useful tools to bring the galaxy to heel, but He would have cleansed us from the Imperium the way He purged the Thunder Legion before us, wiping us all from history like excrement from His golden boots.’

  Sigismund was a statue, his face carved from coloured marble. ‘I am sure some of you are convinced you fell from grace for those pure, virtuous ideals. You have had many centuries within your prison to repeat those claims to yourself. But they change nothing.’

  I have seen Abaddon quell crowds and strike fear into entire populations with the ferocity of his invective, and I have seen him win over some of our most hostile enemies with the fire of his charisma – but in that moment, as he stood before Sigismund and came face to face with the avatar of the empire we had burned and been forced to abandon, I believe he suffered a rare, rare moment of conflict within.

  Sigismund was a man to whom duty and law were inseparable from living and breathing. He cared nothing for our righteousness. He did not call us arrogant. He did not even say we were wrong, because he cared nothing for the whys and wherefores of what we had done.

  We were traitors. We had betrayed our oaths. We had risen against the Emperor. That was enough.

  He could not, or would not, see that we had risen against the Emperor for the sake of the Imperium. And yet, I confess that seeing him standing there, regal and ancient in his absolute certainty, I felt the same doubt that I sensed in Abaddon.

  Distinct and cold, this feeling lasted only a moment in time, nothing more. Perhaps its brevity was because I did not turn from the Emperor for the sake of the Imperium or for the sake of any ranted truth. I, and my Legion, rebelled to survive. We were betrayed, and so we damned ourselves just to keep breathing. There were as many reasons to rebel as there were rebels.

  Sigismund remained motionless and said, with infinite patience, ‘You keep speaking, Ezekyle. Do I look as though I am listening?’

  I saw the shift in Abaddon’s features as he discarded any hope of Sigismund understanding our cause. I saw wryness there as well, chastening himself that he had dared to hope Sigismund would be able to understand why we had turned from the Throne.

  ‘No pity, no remorse, no fear,’ Abaddon said with a smile. ‘Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.’

  He did not wait for a reply. He held out
his hand for his sword. Zaidu moved forwards, picking it up and placing it in Abaddon’s hand before backing away.

  Sigismund mirrored the gesture in reverse, handing the Sword of the High Marshals to one of his huscarls, who moved away with the relic held in reverence. Sigismund drew the Black Sword in its place, raising it to salute Abaddon with the same cold formality he had displayed unceasingly thus far.

  Abaddon raised his blade, and Amurael flinched, not of his own accord but through the exertion of my will. Instinct ran through me with quicksilver breath. So fierce was my ache to witness the fight that I had to restrain myself from taking hold of my brother’s body and stepping forwards in his place.

  Sigismund had the advantage of reach with his long blade; Abaddon held the advantage of strength in his Terminator plate. My lord would fight with weighty disadvantage of the Talon upon his balancing hand, but it gave him a devastating weapon if the duel allowed him a chance to use it. Sigismund would be faster in his ornate power armour, but there was no way of knowing how much age had slowed him.

  And still the gathered warriors on both sides stood in awed silence across the devastated chamber. It seemed human thralls were not permitted here – none lay dead on the mosaic floor, at least – leading me to believe it was some kind of knightly sanctum for the Black Templars’ rituals. Nine of Sigismund’s Sword Brethren stood opposite almost forty of our own warriors; I could not make out exact numbers without forcing Amurael to turn his head.

  Abaddon and Sigismund’s blades met for the first time, a skidding clash that sprayed sparks across both warriors. I thought it might have been a signal for both sides to charge, for us to butcher Sigismund’s elite while our lords battled, yet there was no such uproar.

  I felt the acidic squirt of adrenal narcotics pumping through Amurael’s bloodstream, injected by his armour in response to his battle hunger. He flinched and winced with the crashing blows of the warlords’ blades, and he was not the only one to follow the fight with such ferocious focus, doubtless imagining he wielded a sword in Abaddon’s place.