The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

‘And when a pious thought passed through the mind of anyone looking in the mirror it was twisted around in the glass, and the daemon declared that people could now, for the first time, see what the world and mankind were really like. The daemon bore the looking-glass everywhere, till at last there was not a land nor a people who had not been seen through this dark mirror.’

‘Then what did he do?’ asked Vivyen, though she’d heard this story a dozen times or more.

‘The daemon wanted to fly with it up to heaven to trick the angels into looking at his evil mirror.’

‘What’s an angel?’

Alivia hesitated. ‘It’s like a daemon, only it’s good instead of evil. Well, most of the time.’

Vivyen nodded, indicating that Alivia should continue.

‘But the higher the daemon flew the more slippery the glass became. Eventually he could scarcely hold it, and it slipped from his hands. The mirror fell to Earth, where it was broken into millions of pieces.’

Alivia lowered her voice, leaning fractionally closer to Vivyen and giving her words a husky, cold edge.

‘But now the looking-glass caused more unhappiness than ever, for some of the fragments were no larger than a grain of sand and they blew all around the world. When one of these tiny shards flew into a person’s eye, it stuck there unknown to them. From that moment onward they could see only the worst of what they looked upon, for even the smallest fragment retained the same power as the whole mirror. A few people even got a fragment of the looking-glass in their hearts, and this was very terrible, for their hearts became cold like a lump of ice. At the thought of this the wicked daemon laughed till his sides shook. It tickled him so to see the mischief he had done.’

Miska had come over by now, drawn by the rhythmic cadences of Alivia’s voice and the skill of the ancient storyteller. With both girls tucked in next to her, Alivia told the rest of the story, of a young boy named Kai whose eye and heart were pierced by a sliver of the daemon’s looking-glass. And from that moment, he became cruel and heartless, turning on his friends and doing the worst things he could think of to hurt them. Ensnared by a wicked queen of winter, Kai was doomed to an eternity imprisoned upon a throne of ice that slowly drained him of his life.

But the parts they loved the most were the adventures of Kai’s friend, a young girl named Gerda who always seemed to be just about the same age as Miska and Vivyen. Overcoming robbers, witches and traps, she found her way at last to the lair of the winter queen.

‘And Gerda freed Kai with the power of her love and innocence,’ said Alivia. ‘Her tears melted the ice in Kai’s heart and when he saw the terrible things he had done, he wept and washed the sliver of the daemon’s mirror from his eye.’

‘You forgot the bit about the word Kai had to spell,’ said Miska.

‘Ah, yes, mustn’t forget that bit,’ said Alivia. ‘The ice queen had given her oath that if Kai could solve a fiendishly difficult puzzle to spell a special word, then she’d let him leave.’

‘What word was it?’ asked Vivyen.

‘A very important word,’ said Alivia with mock gravitas. ‘A word that still echoes around the world today. All the way from Old Earth to Molech and back again.’

‘Yes, but what is it?’

Alivia flipped to the end of the story and was about to speak the word she’d read a hundred times. In the original language it was Evigheden, but that wasn’t what was on the page now.

‘Liv?’ asked Miska, when she didn’t answer.

‘No, that can’t be right,’ said Alivia.

‘What is it?’ said Vivyen. ‘What’s the word?’

‘Mord,’ said Alivia. ‘It’s Murder.’

2

The main war tent of the Sons of Horus was hot and humid, like a desert after the rains. Thick rugs of animal fur were spread across the ground, weapon racks lined the billowing fabric walls and a smouldering fire burned low in a central hearth. Like the halls of a plains barbarian chief or one of the Khan’s infrequent audiences, it was bare of the comforts that might be expected of a primarch.

Horus stood at the occidental segment of the firepit, reading from a book bound in human skin. Lorgar claimed that corpses from Isstvan III provided its binding and pages, and, for once, Horus had no reason to doubt him.

Symbolism, that was the word his brother had used when he’d asked why a book already bleeding with horror needed to be bound so unwholesomely. That was something Horus understood, and he had arranged the others sharing the taut angles of his war tent accordingly.

Grael Noctua stood to attention across from him in the oriental aspect of the soul and breath of life. Tall and proud despite the injuries he had suffered on Molech, his augmetic hand was almost fully meshed with his nervous system, but a void still existed where his heart once beat.