Black Legion Read online

  Amurael was one of these final exiles. When he had approached us years before aboard his ship, the Viridian Sky, a swift dagger of a frigate, he sailed towards us with weapon decks cold and void shields lowered. At the time, seeing this approach from where I stood on the Vengeful Spirit’s command deck, I had laughed at the boldness of the manoeuvre. Abaddon had not.

  ‘That’s Medicae Quintus Enka’s ship,’ my brother had said, as surprised as he was pleased. To gain an Apothecary of Amurael’s rank would be a savage coup for our warband. It is true to say the Nine Legions, locked in the Eye, have far greater trouble recruiting and sustaining their numbers than we ever had while reinforced by the flesh harvests of the Great Crusade.

  Amurael had come aboard with over four hundred warriors and thrice the number of tech-priests, Legion servants, skilled serfs and Cybernetica war machines. At the head of this ragged host, Amurael had approached Abaddon and the Ezekarion on the landing deck and cast his bolter to the floor by Ezekyle’s boots.

  I wasn’t alone in considering this a sign of submission. We all believed it a symbolic gesture of surrender – Abaddon was already welcoming his former Legion brother into the fleet – until Amurael drew the power sword sheathed at his hip and thumbed the activation rune. Ezekyle, less plagued by his unspoken burden then, had bared his rune-scratched teeth in a grin.

  ‘An interesting way to greet an old commander,’ Abaddon said.

  Amurael carved the air, loosening his wrist. He looked battered, wounded and weak. No doubt he’d had to fight his way from Maeleum to reach us, bleeding every step of the way. Yet still he stood defiant.

  ‘If you can best me with a blade, Captain Abaddon, you will have my loyalty and the loyalty of my followers.’

  One could not help but admire his tenacity.

  After the duel, as the Viridian Sky was being hauled in by tugs and overseen for repair, Abaddon summoned Amurael to a gathering of the Ezekarion, those souls trusted most by our lord, whose voices he promises to always hear, and who are permitted to call him by his informal first name. Amurael was sworn in as our tenth member, though our warband already numbered in the tens of thousands.

  ‘I sailed from Maeleum,’ he confessed at that conclave, held in Lupercal’s Court beneath the faded and dusty banners of the Great Crusade. This was the chamber in which the First and False Warmaster­ had conducted his councils. Abaddon had sealed it off from the rest of the ship, allowing its use only for the Ezekarion. I believe he enjoyed the gesture’s ironic symmetry.

  ‘What remains on Maeleum?’ asked Falkus, who had abandoned the world himself years before in his quest to find Lheor and me, bringing us to Abaddon’s side.

  ‘Almost nothing,’ Amurael had replied. ‘Only our shame.’

  We walked the war-salted earth of that junkyard world, ankle-deep in scrap metal, every step a grinding clatter. Nagual stalked at my side, bleeding into shadows and emerging elsewhere, choosing his own path through the rubble. Even with the daemon’s feline grace, metal shifted and strained beneath his weight.

  When you stand upon a world within the Eye, everything feels alive. The air itself is blended with the warp’s etheric elements, rendering psychic senses lamentably unreliable. I felt the presence of living beings nearby only in the vaguest, most sourceless way, as useless as hearing voices in the mist without sensing anything of direction.

  Amurael led the way, the searchlight on his backpack cutting across the ruinscape, illuminating the detritus. He soon gave up scanning our surroundings with his auspex, wholly unsurprised at the flawed readings he was getting. He remained entirely unfazed, walking confidently around and through the corpses of slain warships.

  Bunkers and silos amidst the wreck-waste offered glimpses of sanctuaries, though even these were damaged, scorched by incendiaries or bleached and mangled by far deadlier, toxic weaponry.

  When we reached the enemy gunship, sheltered in the overhanging shadows of the wrecked vessel, I took the lead.

  ‘Do not fire,’ I voxed to the others, ‘unless fired upon.’

  What did the Thousand Sons see as we approached? A small coterie of warriors emerging from the ruined, rusted earth, with no sign of how they had arrived. Each of us wore battle-riven armour with trappings of corroded gold. Our battleplate was black, banishing old colours and old allegiances with the totality of an eclipse. We did not call ourselves the Black Legion. That name came from those we faced across the fields of battle. It was a curse more than a rallying cry in those distant days. ‘Black Legion!’ they would howl in mockery, with all the disgust of calling us orphans, traitors, scum.

  The grounded Thunderhawk trained its guns upon us, cannons whirring as they rotated. I advanced on the first of the Thousand Sons, a warrior in flowing robes and carrying a staff crested with crystals, showing him my open palms.

  ‘I am Iskandar Khayon,’ I told the leader of this modest blue host.

  His brethren drew closer. Every one of them was a Rubricae, silent in their obedient vigil, boltguns clutched to their breathless chests.

  ‘Iskandar Khayon died at Drol Kheir,’ their master replied. How many times had I heard those words now? Even Lheor and Falkus had heard it and believed it, before we went searching for Abaddon.

  Wearying. So very wearying.

  ‘I am Iskandar Khayon,’ I repeated, as I always repeat after the accusation.

  ‘No, you are the thing that wears his face.’

  I removed my helmet then, hoping it would promote trust rather than convince him to abandon his misguided belief. Barefaced in the dusty wind, I looked between the lone living sorcerer and his ashen dead sentinels. He seemed to be alone but for his slave-warriors. Even the footsteps in the worthless earth told of his recent arrival and lacked the turmoil that many warriors would have made with their tread.

  My own Rubricae marched to my side. I had brought only four with me, each one a moving statue of scorched black and charred gold, their cobalt paint long burned away and their Kheltaran helmets casting long shadows under the weak light of this world’s two pallid suns. Behind them, Telemachon, Amurael and Amurael’s squad of warriors kept their bolters low, awaiting the results of my attempted diplomacy. Nefertari said nothing and did nothing, except silently hunger.

  ‘I see Khayon’s alien at your side,’ the Thousand Sons legionary said, ‘but where is Khayon’s axe? Where is Gyre, his tutelary?’

  ‘Your doubts are irrelevant,’ I said with a smile. ‘I am Iskandar Khayon.’

  The sorcerer inclined his T-visored helm. ‘You may think you are. I will leave you to your delusion. What do you want here, Black Legionnaires?­ Salvage?’

  ‘No.’ I gestured to the ruined hulk. ‘Answers.’

  ‘Then we seek the same thing.’

  ‘Perhaps so,’ I agreed, ‘but this is our domain. And you, my country­man, stand within my Legion’s territory.’

  ‘A nameless, mongrel Legion,’ the sorcerer said. That accusation, so very common, had long since lost its bite. A few of Amurael’s warriors shared grinding chuckles across the vox.

  ‘Indeed,’ I agreed once more. ‘And if you leave now, we mongrels will let you live.’

  The sorcerer said nothing. Perhaps he knew I was lying.

  ‘Are you here alone?’ I asked.

  ‘I owe you no truth, traitor.’

  ‘What of your vessel in orbit?’ I pressed. ‘We saw nothing in the system.’

  ‘As I said, I owe you no truth.’

  I felt myself smiling again, this time with markedly less warmth. ‘You are coming across as quite hostile, friend.’

  ‘Your name is spoken often among our Legion – Khayon, the Raider of Graves. Am I to believe you will let me leave here with my Rubricae? That you do not intend to steal them like the harvests of ceramite and ash you have already reaped from so many of my brothers?’

  ‘You have
a mere fourteen warriors. I am not so starved for power that I’d kill you for these scraps.’

  His laugh was a bitter thing. ‘How merciful of you.’

  ‘I don’t recognise you,’ I said, referring to the Eye-born changes of his armour. ‘By what name do you go now?’

  ‘I am Aklahyr.’ I sensed the ripples of his aura shift, emanating a grim amusement. ‘If you were truly Khayon, then you would know me.’

  Now that he had revealed his name, I did know him. Like so many Thousand Sons officers, myself included, he had been a scholar as much as a warrior.

  ‘Aklahyr the Erudite,’ I said. ‘Banner-bearer for Bejarah’s Company. I read your treatise on the significance of iambic pentameter in Kantori summoning verse.’

  ‘Those days are behind me. Behind us all. I serve Thagus Daravek now.’ His helm dipped slightly. In shame, that he served the Lord of Hosts? In judgement, that I did not?

  ‘I know the name,’ I admitted.

  He gave a grunted exhalation through his vocaliser. ‘Indeed you do.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ I asked, one last time. ‘This is our dominion, Aklahyr.’

  He was helmed and his expressions were hidden, but I could feel derision radiating from him, flavouring his unseen aura with disgust and doubt. I could feel how this was fated to end. He didn’t believe that I intended him no harm. More than that, he hated me. He ached to swing his staff.

  ‘You should guard your emotions better,’ I chided him. ‘They betray your violent intent.’

  Trinkets and talismans rattled against his robed armour plating as he shifted his stance, levelling his staff towards us. His voice was a resigned murmur.

  ‘Let us get this over with.’

  ‘Very well.’

  The Prosperine lynx snarled by my side. I gestured for him to hold back. Nefertari likewise stepped forwards, but I shook my head. Warband leaders often allowed champions to duel before a battle – for amusement, for morale, for the chance of attracting the eyes of the Gods – but Aklahyr was alone, and I had no wish for Nefertari to fight in my place.

  I drew my sword in place of the axe I had lost years before, that Fenrisian blade long ago broken by the cloned son of a false god. Sacramentum gleamed in the day’s sick light.

  What followed was brief and, with due respect to the dead, rather uninspired.

  Once it was done, I scoured his Rubricae. Bathing them in psychic flame, I burned the blue from their armour plating and withered their tabards and loincloths to charred remnants, repainting all fourteen ceramite husks through sacred incineration. Once stripped of their former colours, the pack of voiceless, mindless warriors fell into dignified lockstep with the four Rubricae already attending me.

  I am Khayon, I told them. I am your lord now.

  All is dust, they chorused back in telepathic whispers as dry as the rust around us.

  Nefertari crouched over Aklahyr, running her fingertips across the rents in his armour. She breathed slowly, slanted eyes half-lidded, her inhumanly white flesh darkening with a hue of ruddy health. I knew her revitalisation wouldn’t last long, not with the suffering of only a single dying soul. I would need to let her gorge herself soon, else the soul-thirst might leave her weakened and less useful to me.

  One by one she sniffed her stained fingertips, taking the scent of Aklahyr’s blood. She refused to taste it, fearing corruption, and yet she gouged her fingers back into the torn-open armour, rooting around, firing his dying nerves and amplifying his final spasms.

  ‘Nefertari. Enough.’

  She hesitated at my order, on the edge of defiance, before reluctantly finishing off poor, stubborn Aklahyr with a swipe of her flensing knife across his throat. The sorcerer’s spasms finally ceased. If it matters for the purposes of this archive, his final thoughts were to curse me.

  Amurael, who had been watching with bored regard, keyed a code into his narthecium gauntlet, deploying a bonesaw and several carving knives.

  ‘Out of the way, alien.’

  She rose, stretching her wings again. ‘I am not going inside that mausoleum of cold metal,’ she said, gesturing to the ship. ‘It has been too long since I tasted the freedom of the sky.’

  Such a futilely poetic sentiment. She wanted to hunt, to see if there remained anything worth bleeding on this husk of a world. I waved a hand, granting her permission. She launched upwards, taking to the air in a gust of swirling grit.

  Amurael had crouched in her place by the dead Thousand Sons legionary, preparing to harvest Aklahyr’s progenoid glands. His bonesaw gave a high whine.

  ‘This won’t take long,’ he assured me. ‘One less sorcerer at the Lord of Hosts’ side, at least.’

  I looked over at him. ‘Daravek haunts us even here.’

  ‘True.’ Amurael began carving. Blood arced. ‘You really should have killed him when you had the chance.’

  The ship was dead within as well as without. We walked its powerless halls, witnessed its annihilated statuary, held uncaring vigil over its slain crew. My hopes sank the deeper we travelled, for the devastation was almost total. If we had come here for salvage, we would have been destined to leave disappointed. The fact the strike cruiser would never sail again was beyond contestation, but scarcely a metre of its hull was left unscarred.

  Yet salvage was not our concern. As I had told Aklahyr, we wanted answers.

  Even a dead ship isn’t silent. Buckled metal whines under pressure. Leaking fuel and coolant will hiss and fizz and trickle and drip. Footsteps reverberate for a kilometre or more, echoing back along avenues of mangled metal, their rhythms distorted, until the senses are half-convinced whole armies march up ahead in the shadows.

  The cruiser’s layout was perfectly familiar to us, a mirror of so many Legion warships constructed from the same Standard Template Construct. Yet my unease grew, chamber by chamber. Have you ever returned to a familiar place, an old haven perhaps, or a place that burns strong in youthful memory, only to find its soul has changed with the passing of time?

  We passed through a grand monastic chamber with gaping holes that had been backlit windows of stained glass. Whatever scenes they had depicted would remain a mystery, now shattered into millions of coloured diamonds that crunched underfoot. A row of golden statues had become a toppled, defeated phalanx amidst the detritus. A great aquila of pale stone, once mounted upon the wall with great wings outstretched, was rubble at our feet.

  And everywhere were bodies clad in cream robes ripped by claws and turned black with blood. The corpses were far from pristine. Each one was someway fused into the decks or the walls, partway through the process of being absorbed into the world that was now their tomb.

  I knelt by one of the human corpses, taking a fistful of its lacerated robe. The sigil on the cloth was a crudely sewn cross, all four tips flared.

  ‘The Brethren of the Temple of Oaths?’ I spoke of the VII Legion’s elite, those rare guardians that stood as sentinels over Rogal Dorn’s own flagship, the Phalanx.

  Amurael used his boot to roll one of the other bodies. The same symbol showed on her hooded robe. ‘Legion thralls,’ he agreed in word though not in tone. ‘And that’s the Brethren’s cross,’ he added with reluctance. It still felt wrong.

  These were Legion-serfs, yet the symbol on their breasts was one we had never seen in such widespread context. These were the halls of a Legiones Astartes warship, yet they were bedecked by parchments listing battles and benedictions I had never heard of, against alien foes I had never seen. In stockpiled armouries we found Legion weaponry that similarly eluded easy recognition. The Phobos boltguns and patterns of pistols that my brothers and I still wielded were treated here with the reverence of museum relics, cradled in stasis fields, some of which had survived the crash. Other, sleeker designs of weaponry were racked in place or ­scattered across the chambers alongside shattered suits of that rarest of
wartime treasures: Legiones Astartes Mark VII battleplate.

  This last aspect twisted my innards most of all. The wargear had all the hallmarks of mass-production, down to the armourers’ marks engraved upon the ceramite. Yet even in the time of shame when the Throne-loyal Legions scoured my brothers and me from the Imperium, chasing us into the etheric prison of the Eye, this pattern of armour had been scarce in the extreme.

  And it was black. All of it, black. Not the conflicting yellow and black of the Brethren of the Temple of Oaths, studded with Imperial victory wreaths and the fist symbol of their Legion. This was all straight black, draped in knightly tabards, adorned by chains.

  It was Amurael who gave voice to the question pressing against the confines of my skull.

  ‘Khayon,’ he said, turning a broken, unfamiliar bolter in his hands. ‘How long have we been gone from the Imperium?’

  Sometimes my Inquisitorial hosts ask me to explain the unexplainable. Over the course of my captivity I have related the form and function of many aspects that define life in the Empire of the Eye. Within that realm where physical and corporeal laws go to die, temporal stability is another maddening casualty. Time exists only as a fractured idea, different for every one of us.

  I have fought beside warriors of the Legions for whom the Imperium itself is a distant memory, even to eidetic recollections. It doesn’t matter to them why the Long War began, nor even how it will end. They have been fighting it for an eternity. It is all they know.

  On the opposite side of the same coin, I have known warriors for whom Terra is scarcely a memory at all – the same adrenal rage that flowed in their veins during the Siege still beats through their bodies now. For some of them, chronologically speaking, it has been mere months or a handful of years since their exile began.