Vengeful Spirit Read online

  Like all of them, he was eager to be unleashed. The war here was long-ended, and but for a handful of forays beyond the system, the bulk of the Legion had remained in place while their primarch sequestered himself with the dead.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Aximand, unwilling to speculate on the Warmaster’s motives for remaining on Dwell. ‘We will know soon enough.’

  ‘We should be on the move,’ said Kibre. ‘The war gathers momentum while we stagnate with inaction.’

  Abaddon halted their march and placed a hand in the centre of the Widowmaker’s breastplate. ‘You think you know the course of war better than your primarch?’

  Kibre shook his head. ‘Of course not, I just–’

  ‘First lesson of the Mournival,’ said Aximand. ‘Never second guess Lupercal.’

  ‘I wasn’t second guessing him,’ snapped Kibre.

  ‘Good,’ said Aximand. ‘Then you’ve learned something useful today. Perhaps the Warmaster has found what he needed, perhaps not. Maybe we will have mobilisation orders, maybe we won’t.’

  Kibre nodded and Aximand saw him force his volatile humours into balance. ‘As you say, Little Horus. The molten Cthonian core that burns in us all waxes stronger in me than most.’

  Aximand chuckled, though the sound was not as he once knew it, the muscles beneath the skin moving in subtly different ways.

  ‘You say that like it’s a bad thing,’ he said. ‘Just remember that fire needs to be controlled to be useful.’

  ‘Most of the time,’ added Abaddon, and they moved off again.

  They traversed high-vaulted antechambers of fallen pillars and halls of bolt-cratered frescos that had once been battlefields. The air thrummed with the vibration of buried generators and tasted like an embalming workshop. Between murals of cobalt-blue Legion warriors being welcomed with garlands, tens of thousands of names were inlaid on coffered panels with gold leaf.

  The interred dead of the Mausolytica.

  ‘Like the Avenue of Glory and Lament on the Spirit,’ said Aximand, pointing out the fine scriptwork.

  Abaddon snorted, not even glancing at the names. ‘It hasn’t been called that since Isstvan.’

  ‘The necrologists may be gone,’ sighed Aximand, ‘but it is as it has always been, a place to remember the dead.’

  They climbed a wide set of marbled steps, crunching over the powdered remains of toppled statues and emerging into a transverse hallway Aximand had fought the length and breadth of; shield raised, Mourn-it-all’s blade high, shoulders squared. Soaked in blood to the elbow.

  ‘Dreaming again?’ asked Abaddon, noting his fractional pause.

  ‘I don’t dream,’ snapped Aximand. ‘I’m just thinking how ridiculous it was that an army of men were able to trouble us here. When have we ever faced mortals and found them bothersome?’

  Abaddon nodded. ‘The Chainveil fought in the City of Elders. They delayed me.’

  No more needed to be said. That any army, mortal or transhuman, could delay Ezekyle Abaddon spoke volumes to their competency and courage.

  ‘But they all died in the end,’ said Kibre as they passed beneath a great, funerary arch and moved deeper into the tomb complex. ‘Chainveil or ordinary soldiers, they stood against us in the line and we killed them all.’

  ‘That they stood at all should have told us there were was something else waiting for us,’ said Grael Noctua.

  ‘How so?’ said Aximand, knowing the answer, but wanting to hear it articulated.

  ‘The men who fought us here, they believed they could win.’

  ‘Their defence was orchestrated by Meduson of the Iron Tenth,’ said Aximand. ‘It’s understandable they believed him.’

  ‘Only Legion presence gives mortals that kind of backbone,’ continued Noctua. ‘With the Tenth Legion’s war-leader and the kill teams of the Fifth Legion in place, they thought they had a chance. They thought they could kill the Warmaster.’

  Kibre shook his head. ‘Even if Lupercal had fallen for their transparent ploy and come himself, he would have easily slain them.’

  More than likely Kibre was right. It was inconceivable that a mere five legionaries could have ended the Warmaster. Even with surprise in their corner, the idea that Horus could be brought low by a rush team of blade killers seemed ludicrous.

  ‘He outwitted a sniper’s bullet on Dagonet, and he evaded the assassins’ swords on Dwell,’ said Abaddon, kicking over an engraved urn emblazoned with a splintered Ultima. ‘Meduson must have been desperate to think the Scars stood a chance.’

  ‘Desperate is exactly what he was,’ said Aximand, feeling the itch where his face had been reattached. ‘Just imagine if they had succeeded.’

  No one answered, no one could conceive of the Legion without Lupercal at its head. Without one, the other did not exist.

  But Shadrak Meduson had failed to lure the Warmaster into his trap, and Dwell had fallen hard.

  Against Horus Lupercal’s armies, everything fell eventually.

  ‘Why defend the dead at all?’ said Kibre. ‘Aside from commanding the high ground over an open city, holding the Mausolytica offers no tangible strategic merit. We could have simply shelled it flat, and sent Lithonan’s Army auxiliaries in to kill any survivors.’

  ‘They knew the Warmaster would want so precious a resource captured intact,’ said Noctua.

  ‘It’s a house of the dead,’ pressed Kibre. ‘What kind of resource is that?’

  ‘Now you’re Mournival, why don’t you ask him yourself?’ answered Noctua. Kibre’s head snapped around, unused to being addressed with such informality by a junior officer. Mournival equality was going to take time to bed in with the Widowmaker.

  ‘Tread lightly, Noctua,’ warned Abaddon. ‘You might be one of us now, but don’t think that exempts you from respect.’

  Aximand grinned at Abaddon’s ire. Ezekyle was a warhound on a fraying leash, and Aximand wondered if he knew that was his role.

  Of course Ezekyle knew. A warrior did not become First Captain of the Sons of Horus by being too stupid to know his place.

  ‘Apologies,’ said Noctua, turning to address Kibre directly. ‘No disrespect was intended.’

  ‘Good,’ said Aximand. ‘Now give Falkus a proper answer.’

  ‘The Mausolytica occupies the best defensive terrain in the rift valley, but it’s barely fortified,’ said Noctua. ‘Which suggests the Dwellers valued it highly, but didn’t think of it as a military target until Meduson told them it was.’

  Aximand nodded and slapped a gauntleted hand on the polished plates of Noctua’s shoulder guard.

  ‘So why did the Iron Hands think this place was valuable?’ asked Kibre.

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Aximand.

  Only later would he come to understand that the Dwellers would have been far better demolishing the Mausolytic Halls and smashing its machinery to shards than allowing it to fall to the Sons of Horus.

  Only much later, when the last violent spasms of galactic war were stilled for a heartbeat, would Aximand learn the colossal mistake they had made in allowing the Mausolytic to endure.

  They found the primarch in Pilgrim’s Hall, where ancient machinery allowed the Mausolytic’s custodians to access and consult the memories of the dead. The custodians had joined their charges in death, and Horus Lupercal commanded the machines alone.

  A colossal cryo-generator throbbed with power in the centre of the echoing chamber, like a templum organ with a multitude of frost-limmed ducts emerging from its misting condensers. Smeared charnel dust patterned its base where the White Scars kill team had thrown off their disguises.

  Radiating outward from the generator like the spokes of an illuminated wheel were row upon row of supine bodies in stacked glass cylinders. Aximand had logged twenty-five thousand bodies in this hall alone, and there were fifty similar sized spaces above ground. He hadn’t yet catalogued how many chambers were carved into the plateau’s bedrock.

  The Warmaster was easy to see.


  His back was to them as he bent over a cylindrical tube hinged out from its gravimetric support field. Twenty Justaerin Terminators stood between them and the Warmaster, armed with photonic-edged falchions and twin-barrelled bolters. Nominally the Warmaster’s bodyguard, the Justaerin were a throwback to a time when war-leaders actually required protection. Horus no more needed their strength of arms to defend him than he needed that of the Mournival, but after Hibou Khan’s ambush, no one was taking any chances.

  As ever, the primarch was a lodestone to the eyes, a towering presence to which it was right and proper to offer devotion. An easy smile suggested Horus had only just noticed them, but Aximand didn’t doubt he had been aware of them long before they entered the hall.

  Titanic plates of brass-edged jet encased him, the plastron emblazoned with a slitted amber eye flanked by golden wolves. Horus’s right hand was a killing talon, and his left rested upon an enormous mace. Its name was Worldbreaker, and its adamantium haft was featureless save for an eagle pommel-stone, its murder head bronze and black.

  The Warmaster had the face of a conquerer, a warrior, a diplomat and a statesman. It could be a kindly face of paternal concern or the last face you ever saw.

  Aximand could not yet tell which it was at this moment, but on a day like this such ambiguity was good. To have Lupercal’s humours unknown to those who stood with him would vex those who might yet stand against him.

  ‘Little Horus,’ said the Warmaster as the Justaerin parted before them like the gates of a ceramite fortress.

  The uncanny resemblance Aximand shared with his gene-father had earned him that name, but Hibou Khan had cut that from him with a blade of hard Medusan steel. Legion Apothecaries had done what they could, but the damage was too severe, the edge too sharp and his wounded flesh too melancholic.

  Yet for all that his face was raw with disfigurement, the resemblance between Aximand and his primarch had, by some strange physiological alchemy, become even more pronounced.

  ‘Warmaster,’ said Aximand. ‘Your Mournival.’

  Horus nodded and studied each of them in turn, as though assessing the alloyed composition of the restored confraternity.

  ‘I approve,’ he said. ‘The blend looks to be a good one.’

  ‘Time will tell,’ said Aximand.

  ‘As it does in all things,’ answered Horus, coming forward to stand before the sergeant of the Warlocked.

  ‘Aximand’s protégé, a true son indeed,’ said Horus with a hint of pride. ‘I hear good things about you, Grael. Are they true?’

  To his credit, Noctua retained his senses in the face of the Warmaster’s appraisal, but he could not meet his gaze for long.

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ he managed. ‘Maybe… I do not know what you have heard.’

  ‘Good things,’ said Horus, nodding and moving on to take the Widowmaker’s gauntlet in his taloned grip.

  ‘You’re tense, Falkus,’ he said. ‘Inaction doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘What can I say? I was built for war,’ said Kibre, with more tact than Aximand expected.

  ‘More than most,’ agreed Horus. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll not have you and the Justaerin idle for much longer.’

  The Warmaster came to Abaddon and said, ‘And you, Ezekyle, you hide it better than the Widowmaker, but I see you also chafe at our enforced stay on Dwell.’

  ‘There is a war to be won, my lord,’ said Abaddon, his tone barely on the right side of rebuke. ‘And I won’t have it said that the Sons of Horus let other Legions do their fighting for them.’

  ‘Nor would I, my son,’ said Horus, placing his talon upon Abaddon’s shoulders. ‘We have been distracted by the schemes and petty vengeances of others, but that time is over.’

  Horus turned and accepted a blood-red war-cloak from one of the Justaerin. He snapped it around his shoulders, fixing it in place with a pair of wolf-claw pins at each pauldron.

  ‘Aximand, are they here?’ asked Horus.

  ‘They are,’ said Aximand. ‘But you already know that.’

  ‘True,’ agreed Horus. ‘Even when we were without form, I always knew if they were close.’

  Aximand saw a rogue glint in Horus’s eye, and decided he was joking. Rare were the moments when Horus spoke of his years with the Emperor. Rarer still were insights to the time before that.

  ‘In my more arrogant moments, I used to think that was why the Emperor came to me first,’ continued Horus, and Aximand saw he’d been mistaken. Horus was, most assuredly, not joking. ‘I thought He needed my help to find the rest of his lost sons. Then sometimes I think it was a cruel punishment, to feel so deep a connection to my gene-kin, only to be set apart from them.’

  Horus fell silent and Aximand said, ‘They wait for you in the Dome of Revivification.’

  ‘Good, I am eager to join them.’

  Abaddon’s fists clenched. ‘Then we are to rejoin the war?’

  ‘Ezekyle, my son, we never left it,’ said Horus.

  The Dome of Revivification was a vast hemisphere of glass and transparisteel atop the largest of the Mausolytic’s stone structures. It was a place of reverence and solemn purpose, a place where the preserved memories of the dead could be returned to life.

  Access was gained via a latticework elevator that rose into the centre of the dome. Horus and the Mournival stood at the centre of the platform as it made its stately ascent. Over Kibre’s protests, the Justaerin had been left below, leaving the five of them alone. Aximand looked up to the wide opening in the floor high above them. He saw the cracked structure of the crystalline dome beyond, sunset darkening to nightfall.

  Slanted columns of moonlight slid over the elevator as it emerged into the dome. A rogue shell had damaged its hemispherical structure, and shards of hardened glass lay strewn across the polished metal floor like diamond-bladed knives. Spaced at equidistant intervals around the outer circumference of the elevator were berths for dozens of cryo-cylinders. None were currently occupied.

  Aximand took a shocked breath of frosted air as he saw the demigods awaiting within. He had known, of course, who the Warmaster had summoned, but to see two such numinous beings before him was still a moment of revelation.

  One was a being of immaterial flesh, the other stolidly physical.

  Horus spread his arms in greeting.

  ‘My brothers,’ said Horus, his voice filling the dome. ‘Welcome to Dwell.’

  Rumours had reached the Sons of Horus of the changes wrought in some of the Warmaster’s brothers, but nothing could have prepared Aximand for just how profound those changes were.

  The last time he had seen the primarch of the Emperor’s Children, Fulgrim had been the perfect warrior, a snow-maned hero in purple and gold plate. Now the Phoenician was the physical embodiment of an ancient, many-armed destroyer god. Serpentine of body and clad in exquisite fragments of his once-magnificent armour, Fulgrim was a beautiful monster. A being to be mourned for the splendour he had lost, and admired for the power he had gained.

  Mortarion of the Death Guard stood apart from Fulgrim’s sinuous form and, at first glance, appeared unchanged. A closer look into his sunken eyes revealed the pain of recent hurts worn like a ragged mourning shroud. Silence, the Death Lord’s towering battle-reaper was serrated with battle-notches, and a long looping chain affixed to its pommel was wrapped around his waist like a belt. Jangling censers hung from the chains, each one venting tiny puffs of hot vapour.

  His baroquely-fashioned Barbaran plate bore numerous marks of the artificer, ceramite infill, fresh paint and lapping powder. From the amount of repair work, whatever battle he had recently fought must have been ferocious.

  As Horus had dismissed the Justaerin, so too had his brother primarchs come unescorted; Fulgrim absent the Phoenix Guard, Mortarion without his Deathshroud, though Aximand didn’t doubt both were close. Being in the presence of the Warmaster was an honour, but to be present at a moment where three primarchs came together was intoxicating.

  Fulgrim and Mortar
ion had travelled to Dwell to see Horus Lupercal, but the Warmaster had not come to be seen.

  He had come to be heard.

  Fulgrim’s body coiled beneath him with a hiss of rasping scales, raising him up higher than Mortarion and the Warmaster.

  ‘Horus,’ said Fulgrim, each syllable veiled with subtle meaning. ‘We live in the greatest tumult the galaxy has known and you haven’t changed at all. How disappointing.’

  ‘Whereas you have changed beyond all recognition,’ said Horus.

  A pair of slick, draconic wings unfolded from Fulgrim’s back, and dark pigmentation rippled through his body.

  ‘More than you know,’ whispered Fulgrim.

  ‘Less than you think,’ answered Horus. ‘But tell me, does Perturabo yet live? I’m going to need his Legion when the walls of Terra are brought down.’

  ‘I left him alive,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Though what has become of him since my elevation is a mystery to me. The… what did he name it? Ah, yes, the Eye of Terror is no place for one so firmly rooted in material concerns.’

  ‘What did you do to the Lord of Iron?’ demanded Mortarion, his voice rasping from behind the bronze breather apparatus covering the lower half of his face.

  ‘I freed him from foolish notions of permanence,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I honoured him by allowing his strength to fuel my ascension to this higher state of being. But in the end he would not sacrifice all for his beloved brother.’

  Fulgrim sniggered. ‘I think I broke him a little bit.’

  ‘You used him?’ said Mortarion. ‘To become… this?’

  ‘We are all using one another, didn’t you know that?’ laughed Fulgrim, sliding over the floor of the chamber and admiring himself in broken glass reflections. ‘To achieve greatness, we must accept the blessing of new things and new forms of power. I have taken that teaching to heart, and embrace such change willingly. You would do well to follow my example, Horus.’

  ‘The spear aimed at the Emperor’s heart must not be pliant, but unyielding iron,’ said Horus. ‘I am that unyielding iron.’

  Horus turned to Mortarion, who didn’t even bother to hide his revulsion at what had become of the Phoenician.