The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Raeven looked down. His arm was dark iron, a pistoning length of machinery thick with grease and hydraulic fluids. Promethium coated his arms and he imagined sitting up as it gushed from his mouth in a flaming geyser. His other arm was a writhing pipe, plunging deep into the ground and gurgling with fluids pumped up from the depths of the planet.

He was connected to Molech’s core…

The enormity of that thought was too much and his stomach rebelled. That one man could be so intimately connected with the inner workings of an entire world was a concept beyond his grasp. His mind plunged into the depths of the planet, streaking faster than light, past its many layers until shattering through the core and emerging, phoenix-like from the other side…

Raeven gasped for air, gulping in swelling lungfuls.

A measure of clarity came with the oxygen.

Lofty metaphors of planetary connection and bodily infrastructure diminished. With every breath, Raeven’s awareness of his surroundings pulled a little more into focus. He mouth tasted of metal and perfume, dry and with a mucus film clinging to the back of his throat.

Raeven was no stranger to mind-expanding narcotics. Shargali-Shi’s venoms had allowed him to travel beyond his skull often enough to recognise the effects of a powerful hallucinogen. He’d had his share of balms too. Hunting the great beasts took a willingness to suffer pain, and Cyprian had beaten an acceptance of pain into him as a child.

The balms he could understand, but hallucinogens?

Why would the Sacristans administer hallucinogens?

‘What did you give me?’ he asked, knowing at least one Sacristan was nearby. Some Medicae staff too most likely from the sound of low voices, shuffling footsteps and the click of machinery.

No one answered.

‘I said, what did you give me?’

‘Naga venom mixed with some potent ergot derivative,’ said a voice that couldn’t possibly be here. Raeven tried to move his head to bring the speaker into his line of sight, but there was something wrong.

‘Can’t move?’

‘No, why is that?’

‘That’ll be the muscle relaxants.’

A hissing, clanking sound came from behind Raeven and he rolled his eyes to see an old man looking down at him. The face he didn’t recognise at first, clean shaven and greasy with healing agents.

But the voice, ah, no mistaking that voice.

Or the hissing, clanking exo-suit encasing his wasted limbs.

‘I’m still hallucinating,’ said Raeven. ‘You can’t be here.’

‘I assure you I am most definitely here,’ said Albard Devine, his one good eye fluttering as though finding it difficult to keep focus. ‘It’s taken forty years, but I’m finally here to take back what’s rightfully mine.’

His stepbrother wore clothes several sizes too large for him. They hung from his bony frame like rags. The laurels of an Imperial commander were pinned to his lapel.

‘You can’t do this, Albard,’ said Raeven. ‘Not now.’

‘If not now, then when?’

‘Listen, you don’t need to do this,’ said Raeven, trying to keep the panic from his voice. ‘We can work something out, yes?’

‘Are you actually trying to bargain for your life?’ laughed Albard; a wheezing, racking cough of a sound. ‘After all you stole from me, all you did to me? Forty years of torture and neglect and you think you’re going to talk your way out of this?’

‘That exo-suit,’ said Raeven, stalling for time. ‘It’s mother’s isn’t it?’

‘Cebella was your mother, not mine.’

‘She’s not going to like that you’re wearing it.’

‘Don’t worry, she doesn’t need it anymore.’

‘You killed her?’ said Raeven, though he’d already come to that conclusion. Death was the only way Cebella Devine would be parted from her exo-suit. But he needed more time; for the Dawn Guard to realise there was a snake in their midst, for Lyx to return.

Someone, anyone.

‘I cut your mother’s throat,’ said Albard, leaning close enough for Raeven to smell his corpse breath. ‘She bled out in my lap. It was almost beautiful in its own way.’

Raeven nodded, and then stopped when he realised what he’d done.

Either Albard didn’t notice or didn’t care that he’d moved, too lost in the reverie of his stepmother’s murder. The muscle relaxants were wearing off. Slowly. Raeven wasn’t going to be wrestling a mallahgra anytime soon, but surely he’d be strong enough to overcome a cripple in an exo-suit?

‘Where’s Lyx?’ asked Raeven. ‘Or did you kill her too?’

‘She’s alive.’

‘Where?’