Their crashing blades brought a storm’s light to that place of austere darkness. Lightning sheeted across the cracked marble walls and illuminated the stained-glass windows, bathing the cold statue faces of Black Templars heroes in flashes of even colder illumination. Those stone worthies looked on, only marginally more stoic than the watching warriors of both black-clad hosts.
In the years after this duel, those of us fortunate enough to witness it have spoken in terms both trite and profound of how it played out. One of Zaidu’s preferred claims is that Abaddon led Sigismund the entire time, that our lord laughed all the while as he toyed with the ancient Black Templar before delivering the death blow. This is the tale related by the Shrieking Masquerade’s various warbands, and one that Telemachon has never contradicted.
Amurael once described it in terms I preferred, saying that Sigismund was ice and precision, while Abaddon was passion and fire. That bore the ring of truth from what I saw through Amurael’s own eyes.
Sigismund knew he would die. Even if he defeated Abaddon, he and his warriors were outnumbered four to one. His ship still rolled in the void, still burned within as our boarding parties swept through its veins like venom in its bloodstream, but if the battle for the Eternal Crusader was still in doubt, there was no such mystery surrounding the endgame within this chamber. Even if fate or a miracle of faith spared Sigismund, the rage of forty bolters and blades would not.
And Sigismund’s age did show. It slowed him, the finest duellist ever to wear ceramite, to a pace that was no faster than Abaddon in his hulking Terminator plate. He lacked Ezekyle’s enhanced strength in that great suit of armour, and age and weariness robbed him even further. He was already decorated in the blood of my slain brothers; this was far from his first battle of the day. Were his old hearts straining? Would they fail him now, and burst in his proud chest? Is that how the greatest of Space Marine legends was fated to end?
I found the signs of Sigismund’s age unconscionably tragic – a fact Ezekyle later mocked me for, calling it a symptom of my ‘maudlin Tizcan nature’. He remarked that I should have paid more heed to the fact that the Black Knight, at a thousand natural years of age, could still have stood toe to toe and matched blade to blade with practically any warrior in the Nine Legions. Age had slowed Sigismund, but all it had done was slow him to a level with the rest of us.
I did pay heed, of course. The outcome of the duel was never in question, but that did not mean I was blind to Sigismund’s consummate skill. I had never seen him fight before. I doubted anyone but the Nine Legions’ highest elite could face him and live even now, and at his best he would have rivalled any being that drew breath.
(Iskandar.)
Sigismund’s artistry with a sword is best summed up by the way he moved. Duellists will parry and deflect to keep themselves alive if they have the skill to do so, and if they lack that skill – or simply rely on strength to win battles – then they will lay into a fight with a longer, two-handed blade, trusting in its weight and power to overcome an enemy’s defences. Sigismund did neither of these. I never saw him simply parry a blow, for every move he made blended defence into attack. He somehow deflected Abaddon’s strikes as an after-effect of making his own attacks.
Even Telemachon, who is possibly the most gifted bladesman I have ever seen, will parry his opponent’s blows. He does it with an effortlessness that borders on inattention, something practically beneath him that he performs on instinct, but he still does it. Sigismund attacked, attacked, attacked, and he somehow deflected every blow while doing so. Aggression boiled beneath his every motion.
(Iskandar.)
Yet Sigismund was wearing down minute by minute. Air sawed through the grate of his clenched teeth. Abaddon roared and spat and laid into him with great sweeping blows from both blade and Talon, never tiring, never slowing. Sigismund, in contrast, grew evermore conservative with his movements. He–
(Iskandar.)
–was tiring beneath the pressure of Abaddon’s rage, the spraying sparks of abused power fields now showed his stern features set in a rictus of effort. In so many battles, whether they are between two souls or two armies, a moment arises when the balance will shift inexorably one way over the other: when one shield wall begins to buckle; when one territory begins to fall; when one warship’s shields fail or its engines give out; when one fighter makes a cursory error or begins to weaken.
I saw it happen in that duel. I saw Sigismund take a step back, just a single step, but his first of the battle so far. Abaddon’s lightning-lit features turned cruel and confident with bitter mirth, and–
Iskandar!
I opened my eyes. It took me several seconds to detach my senses from Amurael’s, so strong was the temptation to dive back into his mind and watch the duel between the two warlords.
‘Iskandar!’ Ultio called again. She was embattled, calculating attack vectors, flinching with the psy-stigmatic pain of impacts against the Vengeful Spirit’s bare hull. Blood trailed from her nose and ears, leaking into the amniotic fluid. The bruises that had decorated her flesh at the battle’s beginning had ripened and split open, layering her skin in fresh gashes. Her left arm looked broken at the wrist and she cradled it close to her chest. One of her eyes was swollen closed. Worst of all, parts of her body had been reduced to raw muscle, leaving her partly flayed. The war was carving her apart. If her wounds were a representation of the Vengeful Spirit’s damage, Abaddon would be returning to a half-slain flagship.
A brother’s urge overcame me: the need to pull her from the battle, to protect her. Its intensity stunned me, for… But we were long past such foolishness. She had been the machine-spirit of Legion warships for far longer than she had been my mortal sister, and the Anamnesis had always claimed to recall nothing of her human genesis.
The entire bridge was stained red with emergency lighting and flooded with shouting crew, yet I heard her gargoyles’ synthetic murmur.
‘Something is wrong,’ they chorused. ‘Can you not feel it?’
The oculus showed warships sailing, burning, breaking apart… I saw nothing wrong, nothing grave that required my attention so suddenly. I turned from the screen to the hololithic mess that tried to track and display every ship committed to the battle across every engagement sphere. It offered no answer either, save that we were winning. Slowly, surely, we were winning. For the sake of the Imperium and the warning they would need to carry, the Black Templars would surely fall back soon. Their blockade was already torn asunder with spatial holes we could break through, but our captains were caught between feasting on their loyal brethren and not wishing to risk turning their backs on them.
I calmed my breathing, letting the adrenaline of Abaddon’s duel bleed away. I did feel something. A presence. A disturbance. If you have walked through the wilderness and heard the distant roars or howls of native predators carried on the wind, if your skin has prickled in a too-human reaction of instinctive awareness, then you know the feeling of which I speak.
I leaned forwards in Abaddon’s throne. ‘Ultio, bring your auspex arcs around and sweep subquadrants fifty-five to fifty-nine.’
‘That is behind us.’
‘I am well aware of that.’
‘Piercing alignment,’ she replied, her attention still divided. ‘Resolving. Resolving. Resol– I see dead space in the named quadrants. Nothing but the void.’
‘Tight-beam focus on subquadrant fifty-six,’ I ordered. That was far behind us. Directly behind us. It was the way we had come, the very subquadrant in which we had emerged from the Eye’s storm. Several of our bulk landers and troop ships remained there, held back from the shooting war. They were specks on the oculus, several minutes’ sailing away even at full speed.
Ultio spat her wordless anger at another vessel nearby, raking it with her starboard guns and rolling the Vengeful Spirit slowly away. I saw the momentary flicker of distraction on
her features as her crew cast the auspex scan in a tight beam array to the coordinates I requested. She could no longer manage the ship’s systems alone, engaged as she was.
One of the Tzaangor beastmen crowed at me in her raucous tongue. I had already read the meaning from her mind before she finished croaking in what passed for her kind’s language.
From the storm, she said. They come from the storm.
I cursed the Shifting God in that moment, which is as close as I had ever come to uttering a prayer to Tzeentch.
As I watched the specks multiply on the oculus, streaming in from the storm’s edge, I mouthed one word, tasting its foulness on the back of my teeth.
‘Daravek.’
He had followed us. I did not know how, let alone how he had made such decent speed and whether his fleet had suffered in the effort, but he was here, and he was behind us, and our fleet was already utterly engaged in breaking the Black Templars’ blockade.
If Daravek attacked now, he could – he would – finish us. We would never recover from this evisceration between the descending hammer and the unbroken anvil, and once we were devastated, he would finish the remaining Black Templars and sail undeterred into Imperial space, stealing our glory.
If he killed us here, then to capstone our legacy of failure, all we would have achieved was to pave the way for him.
‘Ultio,’ I called out, ‘we–’
The ship heaved around us, a jarring slam that struck with enough force to kill power to countless critical systems. The lights died. Gravity died with them, then returned tenfold at the wrong angle, no longer keeping us on the deck but throwing us backwards. Bodies hurtled through the dark air, colliding with one another in bone-shattering impacts and pulping against the bridge’s walls and ceiling.
In the darkness, Ultio screamed. I do not mean she bellowed in fury or that she cried out. She screamed. It was torment made manifest, a sound that even the lifeless gargoyles conveying her vocalisations could not rob of its pain.
I did not know what hit us. Damage reports clattered from unattended consoles. I was sure the ship was dead in space, only disabused of that belief when I felt the thrum of deep, full thrust resonating through me.
We had not been rammed. We had not been struck by a nova cannon. Ultio had accelerated, full burn, without fail-safes or brace warnings, channelling the Vengeful Spirit’s entire reactor sector’s output into the engines.
I twisted in the dark, clawing my way through a gravity forty times in excess of Terra’s, hearing the creaking of bones among the pressure-crushed crew. The soft tissue of my eyes was distorting, clutched tight in an invisible grip; I could feel the harp-thread snaps in my eyeballs, each one a dagger pinprick of blood vessels breaking. The stench of blood surrounded me from others nearby, some crying out as they bled, others lost to unconsciousness, the reek of their suffering forming a miasma that coated my skin. Similar scenes of destruction were playing out across the ship.
Cease! I sent to Ultio. You are killing your crew!
I felt her reach back to touch me, mind to mind. She so rarely did that; the Anamnesis’ psychic component was essential to her function, especially in commanding her Syntagma cyborgs and war robots, but she always shunned allowing me to get too close to her thoughts. What spilled across the connection now was an acidic flood of boiling, overlapping panic.
Ezekyle is wounded I must reach him we must I must he is our lord he cannot die we have to reach the Eternal Crusader we have to–
But she was wrong. She had to be wrong. Abaddon could not be wounded. And I would prove her wrong as soon as I saved the ship’s crew from a crushing death in the pitch darkness. My suit’s sensors registered the gravitational force still rising, now powerful enough to rupture organs. In her frantic grief, she would slay us all.
Slow. The. Ship.
But Ezekyle is hurt he
YOU ARE KILLING US, ITZARA. YOU WILL KILL EVERY SOUL ABOARD THE SHIP.
I… I…
She buckled. The ship fired retro thrusters and banked its reactors, and the gravitational forces eased, breath by breath. The emergency lighting reactivated, showing me a realm of crimson silhouettes and scarlet shadows in an artistic recreation of a charnel house.
‘I am not Itzara,’ she whispered through her gargoyles. ‘I am Ultio, the Anamnesis.’
I let that go unanswered as I took stock. Bodies that I had feared were corpses began to move. Crew casualties would likely be significant, but the Vengeful Spirit held the population of a small city. I had brought Ultio back from the edge before she could do too much damage.
Or so I hoped.
The image on the oculus reformed from static nothingness to a cluster of warships we had left behind, now left to give slow chase. I hauled myself back to Abaddon’s throne and keyed in a code to realign the oculus once more. It flickered to the chosen coordinates, showing an armada of Nine Legions vessels pouring from the edge of the storm. I recognised not only individual patterns of craft but individual ships themselves – vessels I had sailed beside or fought against during my years within the Empire of the Eye.
There was no doubt now: the Lord of Hosts had followed us.
‘Ezekyle,’ Ultio said aloud, her tone lost, distracted.
Be silent, I sent to her, the command ironclad. If her fears were true, the crew – the Legion itself – must not be informed. Not yet. Not until the Ezekarion had weighed its options.
On the oculus, our fat-hulled troop transports were wallowing away sedately from their pursuers, while the picket of escorts we left to protect them were doing what little they could to cover the retreat.
Already Daravek’s vanguard ships were overtaking them, cutting them apart with lance strikes and torpedo barrages. Behind this slaughter came the cruisers and battleships of the Nine Legions, their crews no doubt euphoric and disorientated in equal measure at their freedom. It would not take them long to realise that fortune or the will of the Pantheon had brought them back to reality with the perfect chance to silence us forever.
Tzah’q limped over to me, spitting blood. In the chaos of Ultio’s fear, the bridge overseer had lost his weapons.
‘Must fight, master. Must fight Lord of Hosts. No choice. Must fight.’
More ships broke through into real space, with yet more bladed shadows taking shape behind them. Time was anything but an ally. I could practically hear the Gods howling with laughter at this latest test.
‘Master?’ the beastman repeated, whining for an answer. I silenced him with a gesture and reached out with my senses.
Ezekyle.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
Amurael?
Khayon! Throne of Terra, we–
No. Listen to me, Amurael. Thagus Daravek’s armada has torn its way into reality behind us. Our rearguard is already burning. We are caught between the Templars and the Legion Host and cannot fight both. I cannot reach Ezekyle. Where is he?
Our psychic link wavered. I sensed more than heard boltgun fire, and felt the kick of Amurael’s bolter in his fists.
Amurael?
We are embattled. Gods’ piss, Khayon, when Sigismund fell, it drove these bastards into blood madness, but we are close. Another few hours, brother, and this ship is ours.
Sigismund is dead? Abaddon killed him? I sensed the clatter of more bolt-fire, and the heft of a heavy power sword in Amurael’s hand. Amurael, I need answers. The fleet is dying. There is no time for this.
Ezekyle is with Falkus and Ilyaster. The Aphotic Blade is evacuating him.
Once more, dread made its icy way through my veins. Abaddon is wounded?
His answer was the breathy, exhausted ache of battle heat. I could sense him slipping from me.
Amurael, you have to abandon the Crusader. We have to regroup. If we remain divided like this, Daravek will tear us apart.
Red he
at and flashing pain bleached our telepathic link. Amurael had been struck by a bolt-round himself.
Hnh. Khay–
He was gone, either dead or too wounded to maintain the necessary concentration. I could not reach Falkus or Ilyas, no matter how I tried – not with my powers, nor with the mundane connection of the vox. I was entirely in the dark.
Telemachon, I tried, plunging into the buzzing, venomous nest that passed for his mind. His psyche opened like a blossoming flower in welcome, closing with savage glee around me.
Lekzahndru, he purred. I could sense him fighting, weaving his sword dance through his foes. He was exultant, laughing as he fought.
You have to abandon the assault and lead the others off the Eternal Crusader. Daravek has broken free behind us.
His exultation turned to poison. I felt him suddenly seeking to repel me, to throw me out of his thoughts. Coward! We can take the Crusader! We are mere hours from victory. Ezekyle would never allow this retreat, Khayon.
What has happened? What happened to Ezekyle?
He is with Falkus and Ilyaster now, but if he lives, I will tell him of your treachery.
If he lives? Telemachon, for the sake of all that is sacred, what happened?
He did not tell me at once. He invited me to see for myself, opening the viperous pit of his memories to allow me insight within. The perversions of Telemachon’s brain patterns were beyond my taste and tolerance, and although he lacked psychic strength, he possessed a supreme sense of will. His beckoning stank of a trap.
Tell me, I ordered him, and for a wonder he replied.
They fought. Abaddon won, but was wounded. That is all that matters, isn’t it?
There was no time to deal with his pettiness; he had already wasted precious seconds better spent elsewhere.
Get Abaddon off the ship, and ensure none but the Aphotic Blade sees that he is wounded.
I felt him bristle at the orders. Who are you to command me?
You wish to argue this now, of all times? Get all of our warriors back to their boarding pods. I sent the words, knifelike and raw, into the meat of his mind, caring nothing that it hurt him, caring even less that he took a dark and drooling pleasure from the pain. Abandon the assault on the Eternal Crusader, or I will leave you there to rot as the Templars’ captive plaything.
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