Black Legion

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  The hallways of a Black Legion warship are realms inhabited by innumerable horrors. Mutation is rife within the bowels of our vessels, proceeding unchecked and largely unknown, sometimes for entire generations. Clans of debased mutants and beastmen may dwell down there, but the deepest decks are often too hostile for any true mortal life. Squads and warbands are assigned on purging expeditions, and not all of them return. Those that do speak of entire bio-daemonic ecologies thriving in the lowest decks, where the air turns to poison and the walls are rippling caverns of undulating flesh, crystallised blood and exo-flora shaped from human bone.

  We fought Daravek’s boarding parties through these halls, and we fought the halls themselves. Warriors that fell wounded were devoured by the ship, or by the daemon-things that lived within the ship’s malleable bones. Revenants centuries removed from any sort of genetic purity leered out from the walls and vomited steaming black bile onto legionaries fighting on both sides. Colonies of blind and lost things that could not possibly conceive of sunlight rose against us, and we cleaved through these desiccated husks for the simple sin of daring to bar our way. Partially articulated corpses with amputated limbs shrieked and clawed at our boots.

  In one chamber, we fought blade to blade beneath a roof comprised entirely of ivory. Only when stray bolt shells cracked the material above and sent shards clattering down upon our armour did I realise that, somehow, the dome above us was made of human teeth.

  Most of the time I could scarcely hear Nagual’s roars or the gunfire of our advancing horde. The half-alive monstrosities that made their lairs in the choking dark pressed their lizard-brain thoughts against mine, filling my senses with stupid hungers and sick desperation. I was sweating with the effort of keeping their primitive urges from tainting my focus.

  Ultio was with us in the form of her Syntagma cyborgs and war robots. They marched in ragged step, painting the air with gore with each sweep of their industrial claws and ionising the reeking air with spears of lightning from their arm cannons. Flesh that was not truly flesh burned with a stench that defied natural law, its intestinal resonance clinging to our armour, infiltrating our oxygen supplies, sinking into our pores.

  I killed World Eaters that day. I killed Death Guard and Sons of Horus. I killed a warrior of the Alpha Legion, throttling him until his consciousness began to slip and then breaking his head open against the deck. I killed Night Lords and Emperor’s Children and Iron Warriors and yes, even Thousand Sons. I put my blade through the open mouth of a charging legionary in spiked plate, and I hacked another into limbless wreckage. I pulled the front of a warrior’s skull free with my bare hands. The sound he made as his head was torn apart was something less than human.

  I killed some of them with leaping arcs of incinerating warp lightning. I killed others by igniting the air around them with fell flame, birthing daemons inside the incubating chambers of their hearts or aging them by forcing their bodies to decay where they stood. The veil was thin amidst the destruction, and skittering, stalking, blade-bearing daemons were brought into being amidst both sides, needing no summoning, granted genesis purely by the saturation of slaughter.

  Daravek’s men killed us in return, depleting the Black Legion’s ranks in the very heart of our own flagship. The butcher’s bill for that boarding action ran into the tens of thousands as the intruders devastated their way through the crew.

  Of our warriors, the Riven suffered most, brought to the brink of annihilation. At times we were forced to vault their swollen ­bodies, the daemons within them as dead as the Space Marines they had possessed. We hauled our way through dozens of corpses frozen in the warshape, where daemon and man melded into a lethal amalgamation of killing prowess. At times, both attackers and defenders used the Riven’s bodies as barricades. Necessity, a goddess as cruel as any of the Pantheon, was surely laughing that day.

  Later, I would care. Later, I would reflect on the lives reaped. At the time, such thoughts were beyond me. I ran through the halls, my black battleplate awash with blood, yelling with Lheor and his men in undignified zeal.

  ‘Daravek!’ I shouted aloud, my voice echoing through the mutated corridors.

  Daravek! I sent in brutal, blunt psychic pulses, again and again.

  Nagual roared with every sending, his rage matching mine. I saw the ship through his senses as an ever-shifting haze lit by the flickering soulfires of living beings. I rammed Sacramentum down into the twitching bodies of the legionaries he tore apart and left on the deck, while he fell upon those I left wounded, eviscerating them with fang and claw. Never had we hunted in such harmony.

  I came upon Thagus Daravek in the middle of a firefight, as he sought to battle his way to the bridge. He was screaming Ezekyle’s name in a frothing incantation, demanding that Abaddon show himself, whining that he was forced to massacre his way through the Black Legion’s dregs because its overlord was a coward.

  It did not occur to him that Abaddon would be aboard the ­Eternal Crusader, let alone that my lord might already be dead, slain by a hand far more righteous than Daravek’s own.

  The corridor was unremarkable, the same as any one of a thousand other thoroughfares inside the ship. The floor was strewn with an uneven ocean of wreckage from destroyed Syntagma automatons. Bodies in black armour added shadows to the scorched metal and sprays of sparks.

  One of the wounded Syntagma Thallax turned its domed face up to me from where it lay on the floor. A bloody, wire-veined skull within the broken face-dome stared out through the mechanical implants that served in place of eyeballs.

  ‘Thane,’ it said in a distorted squeal of abused vocalisation. ‘Thane. Reports. Boarding. Parties. Recovered.’

  ‘My thanks, Ultio,’ I replied. ‘Now get us out of here.’ And then, looking across the battling warriors, I shouted, ‘Daravek!’ and ran into the fray.

  I did not see Delvarus die. He was already a twisted shape at Dara­vek’s feet: winged, crowned with horns, bearing weapons that had fused to his skin as he wore the warshape. The mangled, mutated snarl of his helmet’s faceplate was slack in death. The axe blow that slew him had opened his torso from throat to groin, spilling a feast of wretched guts upon the floor in a heap that still quivered with remnants of daemonic life.

  He had not been Ezekarion, but he had been a ranking Legion officer, both capable and loyal. In redeeming myself, I would also avenge him and his fallen brethren. It was with that thought in mind that I stepped into the iron-raining, explosive storm of bolt shells, a kine shield projected before me, altering all incoming energy into sound and light. It was like pushing a sun-flare before me; even I had to turn my gaze from it until my genhanced eyes adjusted.

  ‘Assassin!’ I heard Daravek call. ‘Where is your master, dog?’

  He stamped on Delvarus’ remains, grinding the Secondborn’s helmed head into the deck, triggering a spillage of cranial blood and pulped brain matter. ‘Where is Abaddon?’

  He does not know, I realised. And in that moment, confronted with Daravek’s ignorance, I felt the certainty of revelation. Ashur-Kai’s final words lashed through my mind – Tokugra’s crude, stupid poetry, conveying my former master’s final prophecy.

  My answer was to charge, blade in hand. No more threats, no more words. I had learned my lessons where Daravek was concerned. He laughed and met my charge with his own.

  There was no knightly duel for us, no austere surroundings or awestruck witnesses. We ran at each other, shooting, cursing, sprinting – a scene no different from every other warrior around us.

  Axe met sword in the snarl of conflicting power fields. I chanted as I fought, repeating a Tizcan mantra of focus, channelling my will into my flesh to move swifter, strike harder. The effect was narcotic, and the lactic burn of overworked muscles was a small sacrifice for the chance to see Daravek’s spined features go taut at needing to brace against my sudden strength.

  We were face to face
, blade-locked and straining. A bolt shell impacted at the side of my knee, threatening to unbalance me. Three shells cracked and burst against Daravek’s warped Cataphractii shoulders. He only heaved with renewed force.

  I spat full into his face, immediately rewarded with the hiss of dissolving flesh as the acid of my saliva started eating into his cheek. I had wanted to hit his eyes but he twitched aside at the last moment.

  ‘Give up, Khayon,’ he whispered with sickening relish. His cheek and the edge of his mouth was dissolving inches away from me, yet instead of showing pain he unfurled a tongue almost half a metre long and lashed it across my face. He chuckled as I turned my head, holding my breath against the stink of his infected teeth.

  ‘Give up,’ he said again, the words laden with command.

  I was ready for it. I thought I was braced for it, yet my arms weakened in the wake of his words. My grip strained. My arms trembled. The battle around us no longer existed. Resisting his will was all I could do. My senses could tolerate nothing else.

  He was pushing me back. My boots skidded on the deck with twin, grinding squeals. I spat again, only for him to weave aside once more. He came back grinning, assured of victory.

  ‘Give me your sword, Khayon,’ he breathed into my face.

  I could not speak. I could not summon the energy for anything but resisting his overbearing strength. Instead I reached for his thoughts, my silent voice stitching through his mind in a jagged stabbing.

  NO.

  As the single word lanced into his consciousness, I closed the clutch of my reaching thoughts around his brain. I snared his mind, cradling it, threatening to crush it, tendrilling my senses deep within his skull.

  Doubt flickered across Daravek’s transfigured visage. His hesitation lasted less than a fraction of a breath, but it was enough for me to set my balance against him once more.

  I know how you followed us, Daravek. You followed me. Not fate. Not destiny. Not Abaddon. You followed me. I suspected it the moment you broke from the storm. Ashur-Kai dreamed of it long ago, without understanding the truth. I knew it for certain when I saw you bellowing Abaddon’s name, unable to sense him. And there is only one way you can possess this much control over me.

  We are Space Marines. We know no fear. But what flashed in Dara­vek’s crusted eyes was as close to fear as we can come, and by the blood of the Pantheon, it was a beautiful sight.

  ‘Khayon,’ he grunted. I shook my head, refusing to hear.

  You have something that once belonged to me.

  It was all the warning he had. I tore it from him, that aspect of myself that he had stolen through his own sorcery. That shard of my soul that had allowed him to pretend he had conquered and killed me at Drol Kheir; that piece of my heart that let him remake my memories; that element of my psyche that allowed him to manipulate me and defy my every attempt to kill him. I ripped it from his blood and brain, forcing us apart in a telekinetic burst, my hands curled into claws as if tearing the truth from his body were a physical act as much as a psychic one.

  It did not come willingly, and it did not come gracefully.

  The essence streamed from Daravek’s flesh in ribbons of misty blood, coalescing, taking form. I backed away, blade in hand, knowing the shape it would take, telling myself I was ready for it. If I could kill it, Daravek’s hold over me would be nothing but a shameful memory.

  The essence shifted, whirled and formed. The creature that stood before us, defending its new master, glared with white eyes cracked by lightning-bolt blood vessels, baring its obsidian teeth in bestial challenge.

  Nagual roared back. He matched the beast’s size and bulk, his fur formed of the same smoky corpus, his claws and jaws the same unbreakable black glass. My Prosperine sabre-toothed tiger roared, louder than any sound I had heard before, louder than any sound I have heard since. A daemon’s rage and hate poured into a single word. A name.

  GYRE.

  The wolf – once my wolf – turned to face this new foe. They leapt as one, both huge daemon-beasts crashing through the ranks of fighting warriors, a flailing tempest of flashing talons and biting fangs.

  I was already running. Sacramentum sang in the fyceline-stinking air. Daravek parried, his axe raised to deflect – but Sacramentum, the blade forged from the scavenged sword of the primarch Sanguinius, cleaved through the lesser weapon’s haft and kept falling. It fell through Daravek’s hand, splitting it in twain; through his armoured wrist, severing the arm at the elbow; and biting deep into the Lord of Hosts’ collar, sinking in a crunching snap all the way into his chest.

  ‘Drach’nyen…’ said Thagus Daravek, meeting my eyes in disbelief.

  I wrenched the sword up, out and free. The Lord of Hosts’ head rolled away, tumbling beneath the shifting feet of the battling warriors nearby. His rotten wings fell like decayed sails, slapping wetly onto the deck.

  Nagual, I sent. My lynx.

  Gyre was howling. Nagual was snarling. The former sound was the kicked-dog whining of a wounded canine. The latter was the wet snarl of a great feline hunter making its kill.

  Felines, when fighting for their lives, will bite at their foe’s throats – and if such instinct fails, if they are pinned onto their backs beneath another predator, they will kick with their hind legs to rip open their prey’s belly and disembowel their foe. Nagual was doing both. Gyre, this tainted, changed incarnation of the wolf that had served me ­loyally for so long, was above the lynx. She should have been snapping her jaws down at Nagual’s face, but the tigrus-cat had his sabre-fangs deep in the wolf’s throat, while his huge clawed paws tore at the canine’s flanks. Kick after shredding kick tore daemonic ooze from Gyre’s belly, spraying corpus slime with every slashing rake.

  With a roar that would have done a true Prosperine lynx proud, Nagual rolled and hurled the wolf aside. Gyre’s shredded bulk crashed to the deck before me, and I advanced upon her, clutching Sacramentum tighter.

  Nagual pinned her, jaws clamped around her throat again, keeping her borne to the ground. He radiated a proud rage, and I pulsed back wordless, relieved gratitude. He had served me well this day.

  Gyre looked up at me. She knew me – I saw it in her eyes – but she was no longer my daemon. The tutelary that had guided my studies on Prospero was gone, as was the daemonic familiar that had saved my life and possessed a Fenrisian wolf, becoming my huntress for so many years until Horus Reborn destroyed her.

  Now I knew why I could never resummon her. Now I knew why all my nights psychically reaching into the warp and sacrificing human lives in the attempt to recall her to my side had failed time and again. Daravek had claimed her for himself. My first and most precious daemon, to whom I had bound myself far too closely years before. She had become a pawn, as had I, in Daravek’s long game to destroy Abaddon.

  The wolf that had saved my life so many times snarled and frothed and writhed as it stared hatefully up at me.

  I lifted Sacramentum. Though my sword would rise and fall many more times in the cleansing of the boarding parties threatening the Vengeful Spirit, as we purged the remnants of Daravek’s failed ambition, no other blow pained me like that one.

  Stay dead this time, I told her. Let me remember you as you were, not as you have become.

  She barked bloody froth. The sword fell. And the last evidence of Thagus Daravek’s plan to become Warmaster of Chaos was banished with the dissolving body of a daemon-wolf.

  Silence

  Days after the battle, the silence was still deafening. Yet there was safety in that silence, the very antithesis of the Eye and the battle we had fought to break out of it.

  We hid deep in the true void, the Vengeful Spirit and the Thane drifting together in the space between the stars, surrounded by a significantly diminished flotilla of escorts, light cruisers and captured Black Templars frigates. Soon we would need to reunify our scattered fleet, but for now we drifte
d in hidden serenity at one of the pre­arranged muster points, preparing for the coming war.

  I stood with Nagual, distractedly running my hands through the daemon’s fur. I listened as my lord spoke of the future.

  ‘This is an opportunity like no other,’ Abaddon said to me. His voice crackled from the speaker vanes at the sides of his medicae tank. He floated in suspension fluid similar in both shade and bloodstained taint to the amniotic fluid within Ultio’s life-support cradle.

  The three of us were alone – this deck’s apothecarion was empty upon pain of death; a squad of the Aphotic Blade stood guard outside – and only the Ezekarion were permitted to enter. Of the Ezekarion, only Amurael and Ilyaster were permitted within to tend to our lord’s wounds.

  A rebreather mask bound to his face supplied oxygen and conveyed his words. He was stripped of his armour plating, his pale bulk in the murky fluid somehow reminiscent of a necromantic experiment. The scar began at his cheek, then thickened as it descended to his ­collarbone, ending at the ruination of his chest. Sigismund had struck true, destroying several of my lord’s internal organs, necessitating their cloned regrowth.

  I had offered to heal him with my biomantic manipulation. ‘I can encourage the flesh to regrow,’ I pointed out. It was unreliable, but no more so than cloning.

  He had refused. It was, he stated, a matter of trust. By relying on Ilyaster’s cloning ministrations, he proved the depths of his trust in Ilyaster.

  ‘Cloned organs are vulnerable to cancerous growths,’ I pointed out, to no avail. Cancer was, after all, nothing more complex than natural cell replication gone awry, and adding artifice to the process only heightened the risks. But Abaddon’s mind was made up.

  As he floated in the tank, naked of armour and dressed only in a plethora of old scars, that age-old suspicion resurfaced amidst my thoughts. He had always been huge for one of our kind, and had always possessed his primarch’s features, in the way many of the former Sons of Horus tended to do. It was common knowledge even during the Great Crusade that no Space Marine took after their primarch as obviously as Ezekyle Abaddon took after the Warmaster.