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  ‘Flowery.’

  He shrugged. ‘Close enough.’

  ‘So what does that symbol mean?’

  ‘It’s a combination of three letters, which in turn stand for three words. The more complex a symbol, the more likely it is that a number of concepts and letters make up the final sigil.’

  ‘Sorry I asked.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said, still not looking up from his duties. ‘It means, directly translated: “Ender of lives and collector of essences”.’

  ‘What is it in Nostraman?’

  Septimus spoke three words, which sounded beautiful to her ears. Smooth, delicate, and curiously chilling. Nostraman, she decided, sounded like a murderer by her bedside, whispering in her ear.

  ‘Shorten it for me,’ she said, feeling her skin prickle at the sound of his voice speaking the dead language. ‘What does it mean, direct translation or not.’

  ‘Equivalently, it would mean “Soul Hunter”,’ he said, holding the helm up now and examining his work.

  ‘Is that what the other Night Lords call your master?’ Eurydice asked.

  ‘No. It is the name bestowed upon him by their martyred primarch father. His favoured sons within the VIII Legion held… titles, or names, like that. To the Legion, he was Apothecary Talos of First Claw, or 10th Company’s “prophet”. To the Night Haunter, lord of the VIII Legion, he was Soul Hunter.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  And Septimus told her.

  The Thunderhawk settled on the landing platform with a gush of vented steam and the clank of its landing claws locking, taking the gunship’s weight. Under the cockpit, the gang ramp lowered on groaning, grinding hydraulics. Once it had slammed down onto the deck, the Night Lords disembarked, weapons armed.

  Talos led the way, Aurum active and Anathema drawn. First Claw came behind him, bolters up. Behind them, with servo-joints growling and heavy boots thudding onto the decking, came the Terminator-clad Atramentar warriors Malek and Garadon.

  In the moments before Blackened had touched down, Septimus had been ordered to stay with the gunship. Although she wasn’t included in the order – in fact, the Night Lords were still essentially ignoring her – Eurydice remained with Septimus.

  ‘Septimus,’ Talos had said, ‘if anyone approaches the Thunderhawk, warn them once, then open fire.’

  The serf had nodded. Blackened possessed a vicious armament: several heavy bolters mounted on the wings and flanks of the vessel, crewed by limbless servitors slaved directly to the gunnery consoles. The weapons were also fireable from the main cockpit console, which was fortunate considering the depleted state of 10th Company’s servitor complement: only half of the Thunderhawk’s heavy bolter turrets were actively crewed. Several of the other gunships aboard the Covenant of Blood completely lacked a servitor crew.

  The Astartes moved with cautious speed. The decking was clear, open to a starlit sky only thinly veiled by colourless clouds. At the north side of the thruster-burned platform, a small shelter with a double door led into the spire beneath.

  ‘Looks like a lift,’ Xarl nodded to the small building.

  ‘Looks like a trap,’ Uzas murmured. As if on cue, the double doors opened with a whirr of mechanics, revealing four figures lit by the internal lights of an elevator.

  ‘I was right,’ said Xarl.

  ‘I probably was, too,’ Uzas persisted.

  ‘Silence,’ Talos growled into the vox, and the order was echoed by Malek of the Atramentar. Talos considered objecting to the champion issuing orders to his squad, but then technically, First Claw was no more his to command than it was Malek’s. And Malek held overall rank.

  The dark figures left the wide elevator, stalking onto the platform with a graceless, lumbering stride that matched the Terminator-gait of the Atramentar.

  First Claw raised their bolters in perfect unity, each one drawing a bead on a different figure. Malek and Garadon brought their close combat weapons to bear, flanking the Astartes.

  ‘Justaerin,’ warned Malek. They knew the term. The elite Terminator-armoured squad of the Sons of Horus 1st Company.

  ‘Not any more.’ Talos didn’t lower his bolter. ‘We don’t know if they have kept that title. Times change.’

  The four black-armoured, red-eyed Terminators approached, their own weapons raised. Brass-mouthed double-barrelled bolters, and an ornate arm-mounted autocannon with twin barrels the length of spears – all aimed at the new arrivals. Where the Night Lord Terminators wore dark cloaks around their bulky forms, spiked trophy racks arced from the Black Legion’s hunched backs, displaying a varied selection of Astartes helms from various Imperial Chapters. Talos recognised the colours of the Crimson Fists, the Raven Guard, and a number of Chapters he’d never encountered. Inconstant Imperial dogs. They divided and bred like vermin.

  ‘Which one of you is Talos?’ The lead Terminator’s voice came through his helm speakers like a detuned vox – all crackles and rasps.

  Talos nodded at the Black Legionnaire. ‘The one aiming his blade at your heart, and his bolter at your head.’

  ‘Nice sword, Night Lord,’ the Terminator rasped, gesturing its storm bolter at Aurum pointed at his chestplate. Talos sighted down the golden blade, reading the lettering across the warrior’s armour: FALKUS, in faded indentations.

  ‘Please,’ Cyrion voxed over the intra-squad channel, ‘tell me that rhyme wasn’t his attempt at wit.’

  ‘Falkus,’ Talos said slowly, ‘I am Talos of the VIII Legion. With me is First Claw, 10th Company, as well as Champion Malek and Garadon, Hammer of the Exalted, both of the Atramentar.’

  ‘You give yourselves a lot of titles,’ said another of the Black Legion Terminators, the one with the long-barrelled autocannon. His voice was lower than the first’s, and he sported a horned helm similar to Garadon’s.

  ‘We kill a lot of people,’ Xarl replied. To punctuate his words, he trailed his bolter across the four Black Legionnaires. It was posturing of the most brazen, unsubtle, even childish kind. It galled Talos that such theatrics were necessary.

  ‘We are all allies here, under the Warmaster’s banner,’ the cannon-bearer said. ‘There is no need for such a display of hostility.’

  ‘Then lower your weapons first,’ Xarl offered.

  ‘Like the nice, polite hosts you are,’ Cyrion added.

  One of the squad, Talos wasn’t sure who, had privately voxed back to Septimus on board Blackened. He knew this because the heavy bolters mounted on the starboard cheek and wing tips rotated to lock onto the four Black Legion Terminators.

  Nice touch, he thought. Probably Xarl’s idea.

  The Warmaster’s warriors lowered their weapons a moment later, evidently neither gracious about the fact, nor with any real unity of movement.

  ‘They move carelessly,’ Garadon voxed, his disgust obvious in his tone.

  ‘Come, brothers,’ said the first Black Legion Terminator, inclining his brutish helm. ‘The Warmaster, blessed scion of the Dark Ones, requests your presence.’

  Only when the Black Legionnaires stalked away first did the Night Lords lower their weapons.

  ‘You remember when we used to trust each other?’ Cyrion voxed.

  ‘No,’ Xarl said.

  ‘Let’s get this over quickly,’ Talos cut in. No one argued.

  The prison looked to be in a riot.

  As they descended, the lift’s windows revealed floor after floor of expansive red chambers flooded with howling, screaming, fighting, running prisoners. On one floor, the windows showed a yelling man’s face, his fists beating on the glass and leaving bloody stains. He fled as soon as he saw what occupied the interior, which was lucky for him, as Uzas had been about to fire his bolter and end the fool’s life.

  ‘These will all be rounded up by our slaver ships, ready for the war against the forge world,’ the cannon-bearing Legionnaire growled in his guttural cant. ‘For now, we are letting them enjoy their first taste of bloodlust since they were incarcerated.’

>   ‘We freed them,’ the leader, Falkus, said. ‘We deactivated their restraining cells and granted them their liberty. They are using their first acts of freedom to butcher the internment guards that still live.’ He sounded both proud and amused.

  Muted through the lift shaft walls, gunshots could sometimes be made out amongst the howls. Evidently, not all the guards were going down easily.

  The lift trembled once as it came to a halt on a floor that looked no different than any other. A horde of prisoners, many bare-chested and armed with cutlery or chunks of furniture as weapons, seemed to be beating each other to death with great enthusiasm.

  Until the doors opened.

  Of all the founding Legions to turn from the light of the False Emperor, Talos most despised the Black Legion, the Sons of Horus, for how far they had fallen in the years since their primarch father’s death. In his eyes, they were an amalgamation of every sin and deviation across the sphere of mortal experience, armed and armoured as Astartes without a shred of the nobility that they once possessed. They consorted with daemons en masse, fighting beside them and listening to their warp-whispers for shards of wisdom. Just as the Exalted, daemon-corrupt and a shadow of the man he once was, revolted Talos – so too did the Black Legion in their wanton embrace of the Ruinous Powers.

  But as the lift doors opened, he felt, just for a moment, a glimmer of why they lived as they did.

  The floor before them was a long chamber with a central corridor and walls consisting of cells on both sides, looking across at one another. All the cell doors stood open. Smeared here and there were the remains of guards slaughtered by the newly-freed prisoners. And the prisoners themselves – perhaps three hundred gangers, murderers and violent criminals – were all suddenly silent.

  Silent and kneeling, their heads bowed towards the lift.

  The Black Legion Terminators heaved their spiked bulks from the lift, tromping down the central corridor without paying any attention to their worshipful supplicants. Their power was obvious. They did not live in restraint, suffering through a lack of slaves, taking pains not to reveal themselves to an enraged Imperium. And that, just for a moment, spoke to Talos. He understood them, even though he hated them.

  The Night Lords followed, and Talos suspected the others were as eager to reach for their sheathed weapons as he was. Humans brought to obedience through fear; that he was used to. But this… this reeked of something else. The sense of something sulphurous was in the air, not entirely drowned out by his breathing filters. Something sorcerous or daemonic, perhaps, to inspire such terrible reverence in such a short time.

  At the end of the corridor, another set of doors led into a square chamber, the lights dimmed almost to nothingness. As soon as the doors closed behind them, Talos heard the melee in the prison block begin once more. Somehow, that sound was more reassuring than the silence.

  The chamber they had arrived at had been a mess hall. In the initial riots following their freedom, the prisoners had devastated it utterly, and what remained was a junkyard of broken tables, stools and the corpses of twenty-two guards and inmates in varying states of dismemberment. Several other doors led deeper into the internment complex, but Talos would never see any more of the prison than this.

  ‘What a creature Man is…’ said a figure in the centre of the wrecked room, ‘…to spend its first moments of freedom destroying its own lair.’

  The Black Legion warriors knelt, their joints emitting low snarls at the unfamiliar movements. Terminator armour was not designed to pay reverence to others. It was designed to kill without end, without mercy, without respite. Talos’s jaw clenched at the sight of the Warmaster’s elite bowing down. Even the Atramentar, 10th Company’s finest, never knelt before the Exalted.

  The figure in the centre of the room turned, and Talos met the eyes of the most powerful, most feared being in the galaxy. The figure smiled warmly.

  ‘Talos,’ said Abaddon the Despoiler, Warmaster of Chaos. ‘We must speak, you and I.’

  VIII

  WARMASTER

  ‘When in the heart of the foe, show only your strength.

  Never bare your throat, never sheathe your sword.

  We are Astartes. Not diplomats. Not ambassadors. We are warriors all.

  If you are within the enemy’s fortress, you have already breached his best defences.

  You hold all the advantages.

  Use them.’

  – The war-sage Malcharion

  Excerpted from his work, The Tenebrous Path,

  Abaddon smiled as he spoke.

  A smile was the last thing Talos had been expecting.

  In his own suit of Terminator war-plate, the Warmaster dwarfed his men and the Atramentar alike, and the consummately crafted black ceramite he wore was bedecked in ornate finery, emblazoned with brass and bronze edges, and bearing the glaring, slitted, fire-orange Eye of Horus on the centre of his chestplate. A cloak of grey-white fur, the hide of some huge wolf-beast, was draped across his massive shoulders. As with his elite warriors, his back sported spear-like trophy racks, each of them impaling a clutch of Astartes helms. Several of them were at the right angle to stare lifelessly at Talos, their dead gaze an unsubtle reminder of the millions of lives lost to the Warmaster’s machinations in ten thousand years of rebellion and heresy.

  His right hand ended in a vicious power claw of archaic, unique design. The bladed talons, as long as an Astartes’s arm, curved and glinted in the half-light of the flickering wall lamps. Horus, favoured son of the Emperor, had worn that gauntlet in the Great Crusade and the Heresy that followed. He’d used it to slay the angel Sanguinius, and wound the Emperor unto the edge of death. Now the dread weapon graced the fist of his gene-son, the leader of his fallen Legion.

  That weapon alone almost brought about the urge to kneel, to show respect to the one who carried the blades of ultimate heresy.

  But it was the Warmaster’s face that drew Talos’s attention above all else. Abaddon would never be considered handsome, and the regal lethality emanating from him was nothing a human could project. His face was lined and scarred from centuries of battle, the marks across his pale skin speaking of a thousand battles on a thousand worlds. His head was shaven but for a topknot of his blue-black hair.

  In his eyes, Talos saw the death of the galaxy. They burned with inner light, made bright by the dreams of conquest that infested his every waking moment, yet tinged with desperate fury, a longing to inflict vengeance upon the heart of the Imperium.

  Like Chaos itself, Abaddon was a clash of contradictions.

  And Talos hated his warm, welcoming smile. He could almost smell the corruption beneath the man’s skin, a rank scent of charred metal and polluted flesh that teased the edges of Talos’s senses.

  ‘You smell that?’ he voxed to First Claw.

  ‘Yes,’ from Xarl. ‘I smell spoiled meat and… something more. They are ripe with corruption, all of them. The Terminators are likely mutated under their armour.’

  From there, their replies deteriorated in usefulness.

  ‘The Warmaster smells like he’s been boiling human flesh in engine oil,’ Cyrion ventured, slightly less helpfully.

  All Talos got back from Uzas was an acknowledgement blip – a single burst of quiet static indicating an affirmation.

  ‘I thank you for coming to meet me, brother,’ the Warmaster said, his words graceful where his voice was not. It rumbled from his throat, guttural and feral, another contradiction to add to the growing list. Talos wondered how much of this was intentional, designed to throw supplicants off-guard when they came before the great Despoiler.

  ‘I have come, Warmaster,’ Talos said, and his targeting reticule locked onto the Black Legion commander, flashing white as it registered the weapons on his person. The Talon of Horus. The storm bolter attached to the great lightning claw. The blade at the Warmaster’s hip.

  Threat, a Nostraman warning rune flickered across his retinal display. Talos didn’t dismiss it from view
.

  ‘And you do not kneel,’ Abaddon said, his growl not quite letting the words become a question.

  ‘I kneel only before my primarch, Warmaster. Since his death, I kneel before no one. I mean no disrespect.’

  ‘I see.’ Talos’s attention was drawn to the Talon of Horus for a moment as the Warmaster gestured with the scythe-like claws to the door. ‘My brothers, and honoured Night Lord guests… Leave us. The prophet and I have much to discuss.’

  Talos’s vox-link clicked live. ‘We’ll be nearby,’ Cyrion said.

  ‘We will remain with the Justaerin,’ Malek grunted. Talos could hear his eagerness with troubling clarity.

  Cyrion had picked up on it, too. ‘You sound like you want them to start something.’ Neither of the Atramentar replied, though the others could make out muted vox clicks as the two Terminators shared private communication.

  Once they were alone in the ruined mess hall, Talos scanned the room, his eyes panning over the wreckage.

  ‘This is not the kind of place I had expected to find you, sir.’

  ‘No?’ Abaddon stalked closer, his movements lumbering in the heavy plate, yet somehow more threatening than other Terminators. It was the economy of his movement, Talos realised. The Warmaster’s every movement was precise, measured and exact. He wore the armour like a second skin.

  ‘A destroyed mess hall in an internment spire. Hardly the place to find the one who once led us all.’

  ‘I still lead you all, Talos.’

  ‘From a certain point of view,’ the Night Lord allowed.

  ‘I wanted to walk the halls of this prison spire myself, and I have neither the time nor the desire to stand upon worthless ceremony. I was here, and I demanded your presence. So it is here that we meet.’

  Talos felt his skin crawl at the superiority in the commander’s tone. Who was he to speak to one of the sons of Konrad Curze in this way? A captain in a broken Legion, now twisted by the favour of daemons. He deserved respect for his might, but not obeisance. Not fealty or subservience.

  ‘I am here, Warmaster. Now tell me why.’

  ‘So I might meet you, face to face. The Black Legion has its share of sorcerers and prophets, Talos.’