The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Her inscrutability, skin tone, eye shape and gloss-black hair suggested Panpacific genestock, but she’d never volunteered any information on her heritage, and Loken never asked.

Rassuah had flown him from Old Himalazia to the northern reaches of the Urals to find the first member of Loken’s pathfinders, but it seemed that was going to be more difficult than anticipated.

The man Loken had come to find was Sons of Horus and he…

No, he wasn’t. He was a Luna Wolf.

He hadn’t been part of the Legion when it took that first step on the road to treachery. Not a true son then, but he was a gene-brother, and Loken wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

Yes, Iacton Qruze was one of his fellow Knights Errant, but he’d served with the Half-heard aboard the Vengeful Spirit when things had gone to hell. They had a shared experience of what their lost brothers had done that this warrior could never know.

The wind dropped for a moment, and Loken peered through the stilled clouds of particulate matter, seeing dark outlines like towering giants frozen to the summit. Too tall to be anything living, they were like the heavy columns of some vast temple that had been eroded over centuries of exposure.

He set off towards them, trudging through the wind-blown ash with long strides. The shapes emerged from the clouds, revealing themselves to be far larger than he had suspected, great pillars of banded rock like the megaliths of some tribal fane.

Six of them clustered close together, none less than thirty metres tall, with a seventh set apart like an outcast. Some were narrow at the base, widening like spear blades before tapering towards their peaks. The wind howled through them in a keening banshee’s wail that set Loken’s teeth on edge.

Static buzzed in his helmet, a side effect of the charged air from the unceasing industry beneath the mountains. Loken heard whistles, clicks and burps of distortion, and what sounded very much like soft breath.

Garvi…

Loken knew that voice and spun around, as if expecting to see his fallen comrade, Tarik Torgaddon, standing behind him. But he was utterly alone; even the Valkyrie’s outline growing indistinct in the fog.

He was no longer sure if he’d heard the voice or imagined its existence. It had been an apparition of his murdered friend that had convinced Loken to leave the sanctuary of the lunar biodome, a memory that was growing ever fainter, like the fading echoes of a distant dream.

Had that even happened, or was it a reflection of guilt and shame caught in the splintered shards of his tortured psyche?

Loken had been dug from the ruins of Isstvan III a broken shell of a man, haunted by delusions and phantasmal nightmares. Garro had brought him back to Terra and given him fresh purpose, but could any man return from such an abyss without scars?

He took a moment to balance his humours as bleeding whispers of what might have been vox-traffic drifted on the edge of hearing. Loken’s breath caught in his throat at its familiarity.

He’d heard this kind of thing before.

On Sixty-Three Nineteen.

At the Whisperheads.

Jubal’s horrifying transformation flashed before Loken’s eyes like a stuttering pict-feed and his hand dropped to the holstered bolt pistol. He thumbed the catch from its cover. He didn’t expect to draw it, but just resting his hand on its textured grip gave him comfort.

Moving through the gargantuan rock formations, the squalling static whined and crackled to the rhythm of the ash storm. Did the pillars amplify the interference or was it a by-product of the hundreds of forge temples below him?

The static abruptly cut out.

‘Do you know where you are?’ said a low voice, its accent guttural and hard-boned with palatal edges and rough vowels.

‘Tarik?’ said Loken.

‘No. Answer the question.’

‘The Urals,’ said Loken.

‘This particular mountain.’

‘I didn’t know it had a name.’

‘It’s called Manpupuner,’ said the voice. ‘I’m told it means little mountain of the gods in some dead language. The clans say these are the petrified corpses of the Seven Neverborn.’

‘Are you trying to frighten me with old legends?’

‘No. We were born here, did you realise that?’ continued the voice. ‘Not literally, of course, but the first breed of transhumans were made beneath this mountain.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Loken. ‘Where are you?’

‘Closer than you think, but you’ll have to find me if you want to talk face to face,’ said the voice. ‘If you can’t manage that, then we’ll not speak at all.’