Black Legion Read online

  I confess, the sight stole my breath. This had been the vanguard of the fleet that had laid siege to Terra. Now our gunship veered around these monuments to lost wars, these carcass embodiments of how far the mighty had fallen.

  The planet was deep within the territory claimed by our confederation of warbands, though we had little cause to defend it and even less cause to return there. In keeping with Abaddon’s wish that we look to the future rather than mourn the past, he treated Maeleum with both contempt and indifference, depending on his mood.

  The landscape was a stain of industrial cancer. I had been expecting a ruined city. What I saw was a wasteland: a continent of rusting wreckage spread below us across the bombardment-wrecked geoscape, with grounded warships that had once served as hives and habitation spires.

  So many daemon worlds within the Eye seethe physically, even tectonically, with their masters’ whims and under the pressures of the wars that rage across their surface. But Maeleum, blighted haven of the Sons of Horus, was a place of memoriam and decay. All weapons, all places, all living beings have a reflection in the warp, no matter how fragile or faint. Maeleum emanated an aura of funereal rot.

  This was where a Legion had come to die.

  ‘God of War.’ In my shock, I breathed Lheorvine’s favourite curse.

  Telemachon stood by my side. The turbines upon his back had long since fused to the rest of his armour, and the silver faceplate that hid his ravaged features was now bound to the skin and skull beneath. His metallic face showed neither emotion nor expression, resembling the pristine and perfect features of a young king’s burial mask. A fair reflection of what his face had once been.

  Years before, Abaddon had given the first of his loyal brothers a gift – shards of silver from the broken blade that had once belonged to Sanguinius, the fallen primarch of the Blood Angels Legion. The shards were beyond price; flooded with agonisingly potent psychic­ resonance, fuelled by the wounds the blade had inflicted over the many decades and thrumming with the death-scream echo of the primarch who had been holding it when he was cut down and slaughtered.

  I used my shards in the forging of Sacramentum, the sword born to replace my lost Fenrisian axe, Saern. Lheor had arranged for his shards to be fashioned into the razored teeth of a new chainaxe, a weapon he had then lost within a span of mere months. For all I know it may still lie submerged in the choking swamps of the moon Narix, where we locked blades yet again with the Word Bearers.

  And with his shards, Telemachon had fashioned a new face. The faceplate of his helmet was blue-veined silver with eye-lenses of opal, lit crimson from within. When I looked at him, I saw the wasteland of Maeleum reflecting filthy and orange across his argent features.

  ‘The years have not been kind to this world,’ he said in his ­honeyed voice, unflawed by processing through his helm’s vocaliser. ‘Nor have the guns of the Legions.’

  I wondered: had he been here those years ago when the Emperor’s Children raided Maeleum for plunder, to pluck the corpse of the First and False Warmaster from where it lay in state? Sometimes Telemachon had alluded to his presence in that battle. Other times he denied it.

  As we made our approach, I could tell he was at least partially moved by the sight, his aura muted, his gaze sweeping silently over the revealed vista.

  I did not despise him then, at least not to the depths that would follow. This was before the years where the two of us sought in futility­ to end the other’s life, before we divided the Black Legion with our bitterness, bringing our brothers to civil war. Soon the decline would begin. Soon the mistrust between us would start to fester. But that day, as we made planetfall, the old grudges from his treachery at the Siege of Terra and my subsequent manipulation of his mind were fading wounds, allowing us the luxury of indifference to one another.

  Strangely, of the three of us, it was Amurael who was the least affected by the sight of Maeleum’s landscape. To him this was a homecoming, a return to the world he had fought for and defended against the other Legions while he still wore the green of the Sons of Horus. Yet as the gunship descended over his adopted home world, he merely showed his jagged teeth in a smile. Our surprise amused him.

  ‘Maeleum was never a place of beauty,’ he said. ‘Little changed with its abandonment.’

  The gunship streaked over the rust wastes, bearing down on the coordinates given up by our telemetry beacons. Amurael was at the controls, seeking one particular downed ship among the fallen horde.

  ‘There,’ Amurael said, sighting it first.

  A strike cruiser. A Legiones Astartes strike cruiser, no less.

  The ship lay within the grave it had dug for itself, half-buried and forlorn yet not entirely stripped of its majesty. The warship’s final moments were illustrated in the rotten earth of the wasteland, where it had left a chasm carved by its ploughing crash. It had impacted like a gouging spear, not a falling needle, and had ripped open a wound in Maeleum’s junkyard flesh as testament.

  It wasn’t one of ours. I knew that much the moment I saw its corpse.

  What little remained of the vessel’s superstructure was naked of allegiance. Its wrecked hull showed no sign of markings – at least none that had survived the crash, the fiery atmospheric entry or the abrading winds of the Eye’s warp-stung void. Thus it belonged to no warband I could name.

  That was perhaps less noteworthy than it seems to Imperial minds. The warbands of the Legions, and those that declared independence from the Legions that had sired them, were forever bedecking themselves in new icons and sigils, marking new leadership, new ways of waging war, new victories. The life-reviling Purge were drawn from extremists among the Death Guard. The Steel Brethren were wayward brothers of the Iron Warriors. The Sanctified were blood-maddened sons of Lorgar. And on and on it went.

  Yet this ship was more than unmarked, it was practically unchanged. The Eye hadn’t managed to twist its hull to reflect the sins of the warriors within.

  The three of us shared a glance. No one had any answers.

  ‘Come in low,’ Telemachon advised, ‘and land in the shadow of that cruiser. If there are survivors, I’d rather take them by surprise.’

  ‘That will make for a long walk to the crash site,’ Amurael remarked.

  ‘I have no other pressing engagements,’ said Telemachon.

  As we made a landing approach, it was a matter of finding somewhere stable amidst the dead-hulk rust yards. Retros fired, slowing our descent; we looked out of the cockpit windows upon a wasteland that showed no sign of society. Instead it echoed with the cries and gunfire of battles lost long ago. Our vox-network was worthless, crackling with the babble of ghosts and Neverborn, no words of which we could be sure were sentient at all, let alone directed at us.

  The gunship’s landing claws crunched into the rotten earth. We made ready to disembark. Amurael checked his bolter, slamming the magazine back into place. I could sense the thoughts unfolding behind his eyes. It reminded me of Abaddon, who held a similar expression whenever he oversaw a battle plan, giving orders that adapted and reacted to the movements of the enemy forces.

  I led the way down the assault ramp. The gunship’s crew were Rubricae bound to my will, performing the duties of gunners with the voiceless, patient serenity that my automatons devoted to every command I gave them.

  Defend. I sent the order into the hollow helms that served as their minds. The animated suits of ceramite armour readied bolters and blades, ready to stand eternal vigil if it came to such a fate. They made for perfect guardians, providing no sorcerer was strong enough to wrest them from my will. I doubted there were any warbands left on this world to threaten them.

  I took only four of them with me, beckoning them with a wordless telepathic pulse. Amurael’s warriors walked with them, a small squad of his chosen men. They kept their distance from me. I had always kept company more with my own ashen dead than the li
ving warriors, but it was strange to me, how the rank and file of the Black Legion perceived me. I was evermore removed from them in my duties as Abaddon’s blade.

  ‘Lord Khayon,’ they greeted me with various murmurs. I returned the greetings with a curt nod.

  Nefertari also deigned to accompany us, emerging from the gunship’s interior. She wore her crimson suit of overlapping ­battleplate, spined and spiked and cast from the alien resin-bonded materials her species favoured. I had done precious little research into the origins of her armour – nor was she eager to enlighten me whenever I asked – so the two of us were left caring only for its effectiveness. It was constructed with pockets of buoyant gases within its resinous layers to make it preternaturally lightweight, a design philosophy born of her kind’s inhuman inventiveness.

  She touched a silver medallion piece in the hollow of her throat, activating the jewelled micro-force field generators embedded in the scarlet suit’s overlayer. Kinetic barriers of Imperial make will groan with machine thrums or insectile buzzing. In contrast, Nefertari’s armour produced a whispery sibilance, near silent.

  ‘I told you not to bring that thing,’ Amurael said to me.

  ‘She is useful,’ I replied.

  ‘It will attract the Neverborn.’

  ‘She can handle the Neverborn.’ I turned to Nefertari. ‘Scout ahead. Return with word of what you find.’

  She favoured Amurael with a cruel, disgusted smile, and spread her wings to stretch them. A moment later she pulled them in close to her back, broke into a run and kicked off from the ground on the third step. She leapt skywards. Her wings cracked open. As simply as that, she was gone.

  Telemachon watched her ascent, his eye-lenses tracking the beat of her wings. Amurael scarcely glanced her way.

  ‘Allying with that creature is the most disgusting perversion,’ he said. ‘It amazes me that you tolerate it.’

  This was not an uncommon refrain among my brothers. It didn’t matter that I was hardly the first among the Nine Legions’ warband leaders to ally with aliens inside the Eye, or even to possess one as my champion. Mutants, chem-born, daemons… A warband drew its champions from wherever it discovered efficient and willing murderers. But it was Nefertari’s breed that revolted my brethren. She was the daughter of a species that had, in its arrogance and ignorance, given birth to the Eye. Lingering remnants of the eldar race were considered favoured prey for many Legion warbands.

  ‘She is useful,’ I repeated. ‘And she has won every duel she ever fought for me.’

  ‘She would last all of three seconds on a battlefield,’ he pointed out.

  ‘That could be said of many warband champions. And I would never commit her to a battlefield. She is a killer, not a warrior.’

  Telemachon finally turned away from her receding shape in the sky. ‘Let’s go.’

  We walked, following the tiny silhouette of my sky-borne bloodward.

  Seeing the ship closer brought no answers, only more questions. We watched its corpse from the lip of the canyon it had gouged.

  It still looked Imperial. Its time in the Eye had evidently been impossibly brief. While the crenellated, cathedral-like wreckage little resembled the glass spires of my home – Tizca, the now-dead City of Light on long-lost Prospero – I still found that the Imperium’s stark Gothic architecture held its own bleak majesty.

  Nefertari did not. When she returned to us after her scouting flight, my bloodward offered her perspective on the merits of the Gothic aesthetic.

  ‘Even your voidcraft are repulsive.’ She spoke her own tongue in a sibilant murmur. ‘Can your species shape nothing of beauty?’

  I let that pass. She was always difficult when she hungered, and I’d not let her feed in some time.

  ‘What did you see?’

  Her wings rippled, sinews crackling, then folded close to her back. ‘We have been beaten here. Your kind are already present in the ravine.’

  ‘My kind?’

  ‘Elayath ahir vey,’ she said in her mellifluous tongue. I knew the expression; its literal meaning was ‘deformed barbarians’.

  ‘Legionaries,’ I clarified for Amurael’s benefit.

  Nefertari spat venom-darkened saliva onto the ivory ground. Her pierced lips mangled into a sneer. I found her revoltingly inhuman at the best of times, but when her gaunt features twisted into those subtly alien expressions, echoes of the ancient xenos-hate stirred in my heart.

  ‘Your former Legion-kin, no less,’ she said.

  The Thousand Sons. Here.

  Prey. By my side, the beast that wasn’t a beast gave a low, throaty growl. Nagual’s sending was a wordless thought, a concept rather than language. The lynx turned that pale gaze down to the distant wreckage and licked his sabre-fangs. He moved like a gliding lie, the way a shadow ghosts across a surface, not like a natural-born beast at all. Prey, he sent again.

  Perhaps. Be calm, Nagual.

  ‘How many warriors did you see?’

  ‘I saw only a single gunship. Small. Smaller than ours.’

  A Thunderhawk, then. ‘It seems this wreck is attracting a great deal of interest.’

  Nefertari smiled, entirely unlovely, showing too many teeth. As we drew away from the others, she spoke in low tones. ‘You are gilding your exile in grandeur it does not deserve. Your precious Ezekyle is no longer even subtle in his commands, is he? “Go here, Iskandar. Go there. Go wherever I wish, kill whomever I demand, so long as you remain out of my sight and cease staring into my soul.”’

  ‘You know nothing,’ I said. Abaddon had promised me answers upon my return. I would hold him to that.

  ‘I know I care little for what pathetic mysteries lie within this fat and ruptured carcass of cold metal,’ she replied. Her voice was as dry as the warship’s desert grave.

  I was in no mood for her mockery, nor would I let her irritation stain my fascination.

  ‘Khayon.’ Amurael called to me, summoning me back. I moved to where he stood with his warriors, watching the wreck through magnoculars. His colourless armour was dusted grey by the desert’s gritty breath. Flecks of the black beneath showed in patches where the dust had not yet taken hold.

  His warriors moved away from me, believing they were being subtle about it. My four Rubricae remained motionless.

  ‘Movement?’ I asked Amurael.

  ‘Movement,’ he confirmed. His skin was almost as dark as Lheor’s, with bony protrusions at his cheekbones and brow ridges. Whatever handsomeness he’d possessed as a human was destroyed not only by his ascension to the Legiones Astartes, but by the osseous alterations to his skull since coming to the Great Eye. The small spines pushing through his face cast him in the image of something mythical and daemonic. I wondered what sins were in his heart to shape him so.

  Amurael locked his helmet back into place with a snake hiss of air pressure. His faceplate was a snarling visage of bone and ceramite, bestially crowned by dark biomechanical horns curling back from his temples. We have an expression for such warp-wrought changes on our flesh and armour: ‘The Gods know his name’. We use it for those that have attracted the Pantheon’s attention and favour. It is not always a compliment.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s go introduce ourselves.’

  Few worlds within the Eye are as serene as Maeleum, since so few are as dead as Maeleum. In a realm where ceaseless tides of psychic energy manifest as avatars of warring gods alongside their embattled mortal followers, Maeleum was a place of haunted peace. It was a world destroyed, its fortresses broken open and empty, its people slaughtered or simply gone. The philosopher in me found it an effective if crude symbol for the Sons of Horus themselves, who had danced on the knife blade of extinction for so very long.

  I have heard tales that insist Abaddon returned here after slaying Horus Reborn, and there he competed against rival captains in pit fights and honour du
els, eventually emerging victorious and leading the fallen officers’ men away with him, proud to march under his orders.

  Perhaps there is the taste of truth in that, though I never saw such a thing. I may have been elsewhere, in the exile of my work as Ezekyle’s unseen blade. I have learned not to rule out any story, no matter how unlikely it sounds.

  But what I witnessed was altogether more proud, more defiant, but somehow more sorrowful.

  I have spoken of the warbands that we crushed in battle, and of those that surrendered when they witnessed the Vengeful Spirit’s guns ripping through their fleets. I have told of those warbands whose fortresses we defended ourselves, coming to their aid in the knowledge that we were gaining appreciative allies or new, grateful recruits. The Black Legion’s rise is filled with more of those tales than even I can relate. Tales of those willingly bending the knee, and opposite stories of those submitting with supreme reluctance before coming to realise that there was strength in this new unity.

  These tales are exactly what one might expect in such an ascension. This chronicle will gain nothing for relating them in yet more detail.

  But there were others. Other exiles from this very planet, weary of eking out an existence in the rust and ash that remained. They were the warriors that had held on to the bitter end, unto the very edge of extinction, calling themselves Sons of Horus no matter that their foes murdered them for it.

  We encountered them aboard vessels lost or crippled in the Eye, all personnel dead or in Legiones Astartes hibernation through activation of their sus-an membranes. We met them on beleaguered, war-riven warships limping towards us, seeking sanctuary in the Vengeful Spirit’s great shadow. The exiles, the wanderers, the unlucky – all of whom drifted away from Maeleum, little by little, in a slow, desperate diaspora. The last inhabitants of a dying world, they finally sought something more than survival. That brought them in search of Abaddon.

  It is no exaggeration to say that these Sons of Horus were among our most fervently loyal recruits. When I say that we are the Legion of the Long War, I speak of our rebirth and of our lord’s belief that blood and gene-line are irrelevant. What matters is the hate in a warrior’s heart and the skill with which he wields a blade. But I am also speaking of those last, lost souls. They were the ones who endured the final days of the XVI Legion, and they know, better than any other, what it is to cling too long to the echoes of the past.