The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

‘Malcador said you would help me,’ said Loken. ‘He didn’t say anything about having to prove myself.’

‘There’s a lot that crafty old man isn’t saying,’ said the voice. ‘Now let’s see if you’re as good as Qruze says you are.’

The voice faded into a rising hash of static, and Loken pressed himself against the nearest rock pillar. Smooth where exposed to the wind, pitted where centuries of atmospheric pollutants had eaten away at the rock, the mass of stone was immense and loomed like the leg of a titanic war engine.

He eased his head around its rounded corner, switching between variant perceptual modes. None of the spectra through which his helm cycled could penetrate the fog. Loken suspected deliberate artifice in its occluding properties.

Something moved ahead of him, a half-glimpsed shadow of a cowled warrior with the swagger of complete confidence. Loken stepped away from the rock and gave chase. The brittle shale of the ground made stealth impossible, but that handicap would work against his enemy too. He reached where he thought the shadow had gone, but there was no sign of his quarry.

The mists swelled and surged, and the cragged towers of the Seven Neverborn loomed in the fog as if advancing and retreating. Whispering voices sighed through the vox-static; names and long lists of numbers, tallies of things long dead. Echoes of a past swept away by a cataclysmic tide of war and unremembering.

None were discernible, but the sound struck a mournful chord in Loken. He kept still, filtering out the voices, and trying to hear the telltale scrape of armour on stone, a footstep on gravel. Anything that might reveal a hidden presence. Given the nature of the man he was here to find, he wasn’t holding out much hope.

‘You’ve forgotten what Cthonia taught you,’ said the voice.

It burbled up through the static in his helm; no use for pinpointing a location.

‘Maybe you remember a little too much,’ replied Loken.

‘I remember that it was kill or be killed.’

‘Is that what this is?’ said Loken, moving as slowly and quietly as he could.

‘I’m not going to kill you,’ said the voice. ‘But you’re here to try and get me killed. Aren’t you?’

A flicker of movement in the mist to his right. Loken didn’t react, but gently eased his course towards it.

‘I’m here because I need you,’ said Loken, finally understanding the nature of this place. ‘The Knights Errant? This is where you trained them to become the grey ghosts, isn’t it?’

‘I taught them all,’ said the voice. ‘But not you. Why is that?’

Loken shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Because you are the warrior who stands in the light,’ said the voice, and Loken couldn’t decide if the words were meant in admiration or derision. ‘There’s nothing I can teach you.’

The blurred outline of the cowled warrior stood in the lee of a gigantic stone pillar, confident he went unobserved. Loken held him loose in his peripheral vision, moving as though unaware of his presence. He closed to within five paces. He would never get a better chance.

Loken leapt towards the source of the taunting voice.

The hooded man’s outline came apart like ash in a storm.

Over there, Garvi…

Loken turned on the spot, in time to see an umbral after-image of a man moving between two of the Seven Neverborn across the summit. Loken caught a flash of skin, a tattoo. Not the cowled man.

Whose voice was he hearing? Was he chasing ghosts?

The legends of the Neverborn were garish scare stories of outrageous hyperbole like those recounted in The Chronicles of Ursh. They spoke about phantom armies of killing shadows, mist-born wraiths and nightmares that clawed their way from men’s skulls, but that wasn’t what Loken was up against.

Cracks in his memory and a silent hunter were his foes here.

‘You’re going back, aren’t you? To Lupercal’s lair.’

Loken didn’t waste breath wondering how the nature of his mission could already be known. Instead, he opted to prick his opponent’s vanity.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘And I need your help to get in.’

‘Getting in’s the easy part. It’s getting out that’s going to be a problem.’

‘Less of a problem if you join me.’

‘I don’t make a habit of going on suicide missions.’

‘Neither do I.’

No reply was forthcoming, and Loken considered his options.

As he saw it, he had two; continue blundering around the mist-shrouded mountaintop while being made to look a fool, or leave empty-handed.