Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  We can take the Crusader, you filthy coward. The Legion has never conquered such a prize, and it is within my reach! You think you can deny me this glory? Is this your pathetic vengeance for failing our lord? You wish to drag me down into failure with you?

  I was already disentangling my thoughts from his, ready to cut him free. He sensed the thinning of our contact, and roared at me with the kind of frothing, feral desperation I would have expected from Lheor in one his rage-seizures.

  I brushed his anger aside with ease. He had no telepathic talent himself.

  You have your orders, ‘Masqued Prince’. Obey them or be left behind.

  I opened my eyes once more, back to a world of strained red lights and beastmen crews bleeding and braying and cawing. Tzah’q still looked at me, his beady animal eyes pleading for a command.

  Before I could speak, the oculus resolved into the familiar face of Thagus Daravek, saliva stringing from his chin and jowls, a smile of ruthless self-satisfaction upon his disease-fattened features.

  ‘Iskandar.’ He turned my name into a sound of hateful luxury that lasted unpleasantly long on his tongue. ‘Where is Ezekyle, assassin? I have come to offer him one final chance to grovel and acknowledge me as the Lord of the Nine Legions.’

  Lheor would have made a cutting remark. Telemachon would have used his wit. But for better or worse, I am not my brothers.

  ‘I am going to kill you,’ I said.

  ‘Those are words I’ve heard you speak before, Khayon. Let me guess what your next words will be, hmm? You are about to demand to know how I managed to follow you.’

  ‘Not quite,’ I replied, and cut the communication link to spare myself his oozing smirk. ‘Tzah’q,’ I said, turning to the waiting overseer, ‘ready the crew to fight.’

  As he grunted and left, I looked up at Ultio. Her eyes were glazed as she saw through her auspex scanners and the trajectory calculations of her guns. I hoped it was that alone, and not the shock at her sensing Abaddon’s injury. Her psychic bond with the Legion’s lord had served them both well so far, but if Abaddon did not recover from his wounds…

  No. The truth was that it did not matter. If Abaddon did not survive, there would be no Black Legion. We would devolve into feuding warlords fighting over the Legion’s bones before his corpse was even cold.

  Ultio shifted in her blood-darkened suspension fluid, looking down at me, perhaps alert to the turmoil inside my skull. Fear tainted her features with lines of tension she had never worn before. She did not know where to sail, nor whom to fight.

  ‘Our Legion is dying,’ she mouthed, and her gargoyles spoke the words with a gentleness I had not thought possible.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘it is. But we can save it, sister.’

  Your sister is dead. I am the Anamnesis, she thought, but bit back from speaking it aloud. She had never hesitated with those words. For the first time since ascending to command of the Vengeful Spirit, she was sure of absolutely nothing.

  ‘What do we do?’ Ultio asked me, informally mirroring the question being asked a hundred times across the fleet-wide vox by a hundred warlords, captains and officers. ‘Which fleet do we fight?’

  I watched the oculus, where three fleets were tearing each other apart in the void. Every advantage we held, every advantage we had worked for all these decades, was haemorrhaging away like air from a ruptured hull. I could not reach Abaddon for answers – and what answers were there, even if he had been by my side? We could stand and die against one foe, or turn and die against another. We could not even flee in cohesion: Daravek had denied us our only avenue of retreat, and the Black Templars’ remaining blockade prevented us pushing forth into the Imperium.

  The choice I faced was no choice at all.

  ‘The only way to survive this battle,’ I said softly, ‘is not to fight it.’

  Ultio stared down at me, aghast. ‘We cannot disengage. We will be butchered by both sides.’

  I refused to let her horror, or the promise of Abaddon’s fury, dissuade me. ‘I am not speaking of disengaging in an orderly retreat,’ I told her. ‘Hail Valicar aboard the Thane.’

  She did so. I retook Abaddon’s throne – the very throne that Horus had once sat upon when he waged war against the Emperor – and spoke to the Legion fleetmaster.

  ‘Valicar, it is time to get the hell out of here.’

  Valicar’s voice crackled across a private command channel. His Olympian-slum accent was almost a drawl, punctuated by the booming of the battleship Thane’s weapons batteries. ‘Easier said than done. Even a retreat will kill us.’

  ‘Not if we sacrifice several vessels to stay behind.’

  He barked a bitter laugh. ‘Good luck finding volunteers.’

  I told him what I wanted, and what was going to happen. He knew it was an order, and though he held rank above mine in matters of void war, he offered no argument. As proud as he is, and as much as the truth bit into his pride, Valicar has always been a practical soul.

  ‘Give the order,’ he acquiesced, ‘and may the Gods be with you, Khayon.’

  ‘I rather hope they are not,’ I replied before cutting the link. ‘Ultio, give me fleet-wide vox.’

  The connection clicked and held. ‘Fleet-wide vox,’ she confirmed.

  ‘This is Lord Iskandar Khayon, commanding the Vengeful Spirit. I speak with the will of Lord Abaddon and bring the judgement of the Ezekarion. All warships, do not – I repeat, do not – engage Thagus Daravek. All engagement spheres will work in isolation to peel their embattled formations away from the Black Templars. Do not hunt for trophies or prize vessels. Do not seek to destroy any Templars warships. Do not linger in orderly disengagements and drift into other engagement spheres to lend aid to other vessels. There is no time. You will be overrun. Recover your boarders, abandon any attacks and break off from the battle. Scatter the fleet. I repeat – scatter the fleet.’

  The Vengeful Spirit came alive around me, powering up for what would come next. Amidst the acknowledgements, an unexpected reply crackled back.

  ‘Magician,’ Lheor voxed, his voice rough and weary, ‘who volunteered to stay behind and cover the retreat?’

  ‘I believe you can guess the answer to that, Firefist.’

  ‘Of course.’ He sighed. ‘And don’t call me Firefist.’

  ‘Then do not call me “magician”. That is a word for children and charlatans.’

  He hesitated then, though not because I had corrected him. I could almost hear his thoughts working through the barriers of the biting Nails. ‘We’re not staying out of any sudden nobility, are we? We’re staying because you want Daravek’s head.’

  ‘Two correct guesses in the same hour,’ I replied, watching Daravek’s armada swinging into view as the Vengeful Spirit came about. ‘This is a day of rare genius for you, my brother. Next you will tell me you have learned how to read.’

  Lord of Hosts

  Some hatreds cannot be overcome. The Nine Legions, subject to the whims of the Gods that stir fate around us, have always been their own worst enemies. When Abaddon’s name is spoken in awe, much of that hateful and jealous reverence is because he does what no other warlord can do: he unites the Nine Legions, even if only briefly, and leads them to war. Horus had half of the Imperium loyally on his side: organised, unified, strong. Abaddon has to piece together the armies of the damned from the depths of hell, where they have spent eternity drowning in their own madness and despising each other as enemies.

  Our chance to enter the Imperium as a potent and unified fighting force was broken, our ambitions cast away by the reality of Daravek’s treachery.

  To say we ran from Daravek and the Black Templars is to undersell the scale of flight that took place. We did not retreat. We fled. The fleet scattered in every direction, vindicta cast aside in the name of survival. Perhaps not one of our proudest moments, but certainly among the
most tactically sound. There were no good choices. We chose the least of all evils.

  I will not deny that there was something of a cockroach’s cowardice in what we did, scurrying away from the light of powerful enemies. But there was also laughter. We were abandoning the remaining Black Templars ships to face a fresh fleet, and we were leaving Daravek’s Legion Host like sand slipping through their fingers. They had wanted to confront us and crush us, and instead the Black Legion turned and sailed in a hundred directions at once. Within minutes there was no cohesive fleet to even attack.

  It was not what we had wanted when we envisioned our escape from the Eye. It shattered all hope of waging a cohesive war, for this verminous scattering left us disparate and weak, each ship isolated within the Imperium. We were leaving enemies behind us, facing enemies ahead of us and were beginning our war on the weakest possible footing. But we would be alive. Necessity – ever a merciless mistress – forced our hand.

  A formation led by Vortigern’s ancient vessel, the battleship With Blade Drawn, broke the widest hole in the Black Templars’ blockade, through which several vessels managed to run to freedom. The ­stubborn Calibanite attempted to come back until I dissuaded him with a direct command. He was the first member of the Ezekarion to break free, and it was vital that he did what he could to reunite the fleet far from here if the rest of us fell.

  Ships broke off in the middle of attack runs, veering and rolling aside, awakening their warp engines with no regard for minimum safe cascade distance. I watched the With Blade Drawn recede on one of the insect-eye facets of the oculus, and I did not breathe easier even when it ripped a whirlpool of reality open to dive into the warp. This close to the Eye, the warp was desperately unstable. All our warping ships were really doing was forgoing certain death for a likely one.

  Ultio spoke of every escaping ship in a litany of focused, tight-voiced triumph. Life sparked in her eyes with each name.

  ‘With Blade Drawn is away,’ she said. ‘Talonis Praxia is away. ­Excoriator is away. Zeta and Sigma are away.’

  I was watching the Zeta myself when it dove into its warp rift, and saw how the tendrils of lashing lightning from the wound in reality clutched at the ship and practically sucked it into the waiting maw. A Black Templars vessel was within the range of its warp cascade, and the ship turned in burning, spiralling rolls, dragged into the rift behind the Zeta without the preparation of navigational arrays or its Geller field activated. I sensed the outpouring of panic, and the brief, harrowing agonies endured by the destroyer’s twenty thousand crew as unreality flooded their decks, dissolving them and eating them alive.

  Several vessels were destroyed by their own warp cascades, and I still shiver to think of the many warriors lost that day. Their ships detonated on the lips of their warp tears or were cut down by Black Templars’ fire on the cusp of escape. I saw the Anchorite lancing into the warp only for its engines to ignite as it entered, iron flying into the void and trailing fire in its death throes thanks to a Black Templars missile frigate. Nor was it the only vessel to suffer such a fate.

  So I will not say we escaped unscathed, but the bulk of our fleet did manage to tear itself free.

  The Thane sailed hard, weapons bellowing, drawing alongside the badly damaged Eternal Crusader. Ultio’s attention wavered then, and I suspect every psychically gifted soul in the fleet felt her hunger to turn back, to finish the Eternal Crusader herself, to recover our boarding parties and execute Sigismund’s flagship in a firestorm of vindicta.

  For all of the Thane’s size and strength, even a wounded Gloriana battleship outclasses any rival. The limping, torn-open Eternal Crusader turned its guns upon Valicar’s warship and ­ravaged it with barrage after barrage, taking precious little damage in return. Fighters spewed from the Thane’s bays, and bombers swarmed in a slower tide behind them. All of Valicar’s focus rested not upon killing the Eternal Crusader, but on keeping it engaged. He had to prevent it from chasing down our fleeing ships, as well as covering the withdrawal of our boarding parties and defending their returning pods.

  I watched the Thane burn, its shields down, its hull pockmarked with explosions, and I wondered if I had sent Valicar to his death. If I had then Ezekyle, Telemachon and the several thousand warriors we had deployed aboard the city-sized Eternal Crusader would die next. Even if they managed to take the ship within hours as Tele­machon insisted, they would possess a crippled flagship, her crew in open rebellion, and would be overrun by dozens of Daravek’s vessels before they could ever claim their prize.

  They had to withdraw. Valicar would impress that upon them, I was certain.

  As our fleet scattered, the Vengeful Spirit speared on. The Black Templars, faced with another fleet that vastly eclipsed their diminished strength, began to fall back themselves. They retreated in far saner coordination, racing for the system’s Mandeville point to enter the warp at a safe distance, avoiding the threat of warp cascades. It ached to watch them withdraw, knowing they would sail across the Imperium and spread warning of our return. Any element of surprise we might have grasped had been cruelly stolen from our clutches.

  Daravek would pay for that.

  The Lord of Hosts was bold, and the flagship of his Kryptarus warband – the Death Guard battleship Domina – sailed at the vanguard of his fleet. It pulled away from the troop ships it had been firing upon and aligned with us, ready to pitch its might against the wounded Vengeful Spirit.

  They would board us, of that there was no doubt. The Vengeful Spirit was a treasure no warlord could resist.

  Our arrival forced several of Daravek’s ships to break off from their slaughtering runs, and Ultio’s laughter rang out across the bridge as she tracked them in a spread of hololithic runes. I followed the unfolding data stream, seeing at once what had spurred her amusement.

  ‘His fleet,’ she said aloud. ‘It is disintegrating.’

  She was wounded and distracted so I could forgive her hyperbole, but she was not entirely incorrect. The Legion Host was veering apart, craft by craft, warband by warband. Their captains had returned to the material realm and had concerns far beyond Daravek’s grudge with Ezekyle. They were tasting freedom as keenly as we had, and now took fate into their own hands, deserting him.

  ‘Do not fire on any warships abandoning the Legion Host,’ I ordered. ‘Focus all fire on defending our troop transports. Come in close enough to entice boarders, Ultio. We want them to feel welcome.’

  ‘Compliance,’ she agreed.

  ‘And remain engaged only until Valicar reports recovery of the boarding teams. As soon as the Thane voxes success, disengage at once.’

  ‘It will be done,’ she promised.

  As I watched Daravek’s flagship power closer, Abaddon’s words returned to me unbidden, from the night we had sparred and he had delivered his judgement of my failings in vindicta: ‘We stand on the edge of returning to the Imperium we built with our own sweat and sacrifice. Thagus Daravek will come for us before the end. I need him dead, Iskandar. No more excuses. I need him dead.’

  Ezekyle, damn him, had been right yet again. This was why he left me aboard the Vengeful Spirit. Not out of distrust at all. Quite the opposite.

  My pulse quickened.

  ‘Boarding pods incoming from the Domina,’ one of the human crew called. I was smiling now, unable to stop myself.

  Nagual, come to me.

  Master? The beast rose from my shadow, melting out of the blackness, padding onto the deck behind me. I sent him a ripple of approval at answering my summons so swiftly.

  I drew Sacramentum and observed my reflection in the silver blade. I was still smiling. Grinning, in truth – the face that looked back at me was all teeth and narrowed eyes, like Lheor when he fought for the War God’s favour.

  One way or another, Nagual, it is time to finish this.

  Though I have watched my home world burn around me, and have
committed massacres and commanded genocides, I still balk to remember that day’s battle in its entirety. Every action echoes within the warp, and the fighting was savage enough that the daemonic choirs shrieked behind the veil with a multitude of monsters waiting to be born.

  For almost every soul aboard a warship, void war is a diminishment of the senses, with the world around you reduced to the tremors of the deck beneath your feet, the thunder of guns against the hull and the tight, hot cacophony of fighting in confined corridors. Inside a warship, you are fighting through an expanse of territory the size and complexity of a city, and existence shrinks to the ceaseless work of fighting tunnel by tunnel, sealing boarding breaches or holding them open, answering relocation orders, following the layout hololiths, dragging bodies aside to clear the way or using them as barricades – all without knowing if the ship around you is already dead. Has the bridge been taken? Is the external war going well, or are you already doomed? How much of the ship is already overrun by boarding parties?

  There is no order, no overview. It is trench warfare, moment to-moment tunnel fighting and guerrilla insurgency all at once. Sanity returns only in the brief cessations when you steal enough time to calculate where you are needed next, or needed most.

  I was with the War God’s Maw, the raiders and barbarians that fought beneath Lheor’s banner. Their black armour was encrusted with the brass emblem of their divine patron, along with Cthonian runes and Nagrakali hieroglyphs promising blood and souls and skulls in the War God’s honour. The Eye of Horus upon the Eightfold Path showed in dirty gold upon their battleplate.

  I fought with Nagual and Lheor at my side, killing to the metallic crashing of a heavy bolter and the guttural roars of a tiger-like beast that had been extinct for centuries. We advanced without thought of tactics, wading into the disorder, willingly becoming part of the wretched fever that possessed the ship’s deepest decks.