The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

A golden eagle icon within the sensorium depicted his father’s Knight a thousand metres below him. Cyprian Devine, Lord Commander Imperial of Molech, was rapidly approaching his hundred and twenty-fifth year, but still piloted Hellblade like he thought he was the equal of Raeven’s juvenated sixty-four.

Hellblade was old, far older than Banelash, and was said to be one of the original vajras that rode the Fulgurine Path with the Stormlord, thousands of years ago. Raeven thought that unlikely. The Sacristans could barely maintain the war machines of Molech’s noble Houses without their dour Mechanicum overseers to hand.

What hope would they have had before then?

Darting icons representing House Devine’s retainers, beaters and huscarls on skimmer-bikes ranged around his father’s Knight, but Raeven had long since outrun them into the mountains’ misty peaks.

If anyone was going to slay the beasts, it would be him.

The tracks of the rogue mallahgra pair led into the highest regions of the Untar Mesas, a knifeback range of mountains that effectively divided the world in two. It was rare for the great beasts – once so plentiful on Molech, now hunted almost to extinction – to come within sight of human beings, but as their numbers dwindled, so too did the extent of their hunting grounds.

The last three winters had been harsh, and the springs scarcely less so, with snow blocking the paths through the mountains. Prey animals had been driven down to the warmer lowlands, so it was little wonder the mallahgra were forced to descend from their fissure-lairs upon waking from hibernation.

The settlements crouched in the foothills of the Untar Mesas, scattered strip-mining hives and refining conurbation-stacks mainly, were now within the hunting grounds of a ravenous mallahgra and its mate. Three hundred people were already dead, with perhaps another thirty missing.

Raeven doubted any of those taken were alive, and if they were they’d soon wish they’d died in the first attack. Raeven had heard stories of mallahgra that had devoured their victims over days, a limb at a time.

Bleating petitions sent to the city of Lupercalia – a name of exquisite poor taste in these days of rebellion – begged the Knight Seneschal to sally forth and slay the beasts. Despite the high level of alert imposed on Molech with the Warmaster’s treachery, Raeven’s father had chosen to lead a hunting party into the Untar Mesas. As much as he despised his father, Raeven couldn’t deny that the old man knew the value of his word.

Despite Lyx offering innumerable pledges to the Serpent Gods to end Cyprian’s life, they had so far not obliged. Raeven had never really shared his sister-wife’s faith in the old religion, only indulging her beliefs for the carnal and intoxicating diversions they provided from the daily tedium of existence.

The path he was following traced the edge of a plunging cliff. Through breaks in the fog and cloud, Raeven could see the plains thousands of metres below. The trees reached almost to the sheer drop, snapped off where the brutish mallahgra had passed.

Their trail was easy enough to follow. Blood stained the ground in slashing arcs and every now and then he saw splintered nubs of discarded bone jutting from the snow. He’d inloaded the bio-sign taken from the latest attack to Banelash’s auspex, and it was only a matter of time until he came upon the beasts.

‘Sooner than I thought,’ he said, emerging onto a widened area of clear ground, and halting his Knight’s advance as he saw a huge body lying butchered on the snow before him.

At full height, a mallahgra stood nearly seven metres tall, with bulky simian shoulders and long, muscular arms that could tear an unskilled Knight apart. Their heads were blunt, conical horrors of mandibles, tentacles and row upon row of serrated triangular teeth.

They had six eyes, two forward looking in the manner of predators, two sited for peripheral vision and two embedded in a ridged fold of flesh at the back of its neck. Evolutionary adaptations that made them devils to hunt, but Raeven had always enjoyed a challenge.

Not that this beast offered much in the way of threat.

An ivory-furred adolescent male around five metres tall, it lay on its side with its belly carved open. Thick red blood steamed in the cold, and glistening ropes of pinkish blue intestines pooled around its stomach like butcher’s offal. The corpses of a dozen miners lay scattered around the creature’s body.

Raeven walked his Knight around the dead beast, keeping one eye on the sensorium for any sign of the female. Bloodied tracks led into the forest farther back from the edge of the cliff.

Before he could resume the hunt, the ground shook as Hellblade finally caught up to him. A number of skimmer-bikes followed, as Banelash’s sensorium fizzed with static and Cyprian Devine’s lined, patrician face appeared on the pict-manifold.

Wanting to get the first word in, Raeven said, ‘Glad you could join me.’