The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Aximand looked over at Abaddon, seeing the same lingering doubt in the face of the First Captain. None of them had the faintest clue as to what might happen beyond the gate or what the consequences of venturing into such an alien environment might be.

They had let their lord and master walk into the unknown and not one of them had known what to expect.

That lack of forethought now horrified Aximand.

‘Brother,’ said Mortarion, cutting through Aximand’s self-recrimination. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

Horus stood to his full height and Aximand’s eyes widened at the sight of him.

The Warmaster had aged.

Cthonia had shaped him, moulded him into a warrior of flint-hard lines and cruel beauty. Two centuries of war had left no mark upon him, but moments beyond the gate had done what the passage of time could not.

Silver streaked the stubble upon his scalp, and the grooves at the corners of his eyes were deeper and more pronounced.

The face Aximand had devoted his life to serving was now that of an ancient warrior who had fought for longer than he could ever have imagined, who had seen too much horror and whose campaigning days had bled him dry.

Yet the fire and purpose in his eyes was brighter than ever.

Nor was that fire simply confined to his eyes.

What Aximand had taken to be cold flesh was the power of the empyrean distilled and honed within the body of an immortal being. Horus stood taller, fuller and more powerfully than before. Lupercal had always found Warmaster to be an awkward fit, a term never fully bedded in or taken as read.

Now he owned the title, as though it had been his long before there was any such office to take. He was now, naturally, and without equivocation, the Warmaster.

Aximand, Abaddon and Kibre backed away from Horus, each of them dropping to their knees in wonder as the power filling the primarch bloomed in the material world.

Even Mortarion, that most truculent of primarchs, bent the knee to Horus in a way he had never done for the Emperor.

Horus grinned and all trace of the war-weary ancient was banished in the blink of an eye. In his place was a mortal god, brighter and more dangerous than ever. Filled with a power that only one other being in all existence had wielded before.

‘Yes,’ said Horus. ‘I found exactly what I was looking for.’

TWENTY-FOUR Leaving Lupercalia / Ill met by moonlight / Hunter’s eye

1

Lupercalia was burning.

The Sons of Horus had not lit the fires, but Aximand watched them spread through the knotted streets of the lower valley as the Warmaster’s Stormbird cleared the citadel’s walls. The Knights of House Devine stalked the streets of their city like vengeful predators, burning and killing with wanton abandon.

One machine, a burn-scarred thing with a lashing whip weapon danced in the light of the revel fires, its warhorn hooting as though its pilot were drunk.

Aximand forgot the Knights as the angle of the gunship’s ascent became steeper and a number of Thunderhawks took up station on either wing.

‘It’s strange to be leaving a world so soon after arriving,’ said Falkus Kibre, scrolling through a data-slate bearing a force disposition assay. ‘Especially when there’s still armies to fight.’

‘No one worth fighting,’ grunted Abaddon from farther along the compartment. He’d said little since they’d emerged from the catacombs beneath the citadel. ‘The fight before Lupercalia destroyed the best of them.’

Kibre shook his head. ‘Orbital surveys say there’s tens of thousands of soldiers and dozens of armoured regiments have fled across the mountains on the edges of the southern steppe.’

Abaddon said nothing. Aximand knew Ezekyle better than most and knew when to leave well alone.

This was one such moment.

‘The Kushite Eastings and Northern Oceanic were largely wiped out at Lupercalia and Avadon,’ continued Kibre who, as Abaddon’s second, should have known not to press the issue. ‘But van Valkenberg and Malbek are still unaccounted for.’

‘Then you go down and bloody finish them!’ snapped Abaddon.

Kibre took Abaddon’s outburst stoically and replaced the slate in its niche.

‘Ezekyle,’ said Kibre. ‘We fought the hardest down there, you and I.’

Aximand scowled at that. The Fifth Company had fought their way through the XIII Legion to break the line, and they’d done it without the support of an orbital weapons platform.

‘We faced a bloody Imperator and lived,’ continued the Widowmaker, ‘So don’t make me come up there and slap you for being unmindful of what we did.’

Aximand revised his assumption that he knew Ezekyle better than most when, instead of killing Kibre, Abaddon grunted in laughter.

‘You’re right, Falkus,’ said Abaddon. ‘It does feel somehow... unfinished.’

That at least, Aximand understood. Like all true fighting men down through the ages, he hated to abandon a mission before it was finished. But Ezekyle had things wrong.

‘It is finished,’ he said.