The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

The captives wailed and their captors tightened their grips.

Maloghurst produced a long dagger from within his robes, its blade curved and worked from dark stone. Its surface was chipped and crude, like something hacked from the ground by savages, but Targost knew its edge to be sharper than any arming chamber tech could match.

‘Is that…’ he began.

‘One of the blades Erebus crafted?’ said Maloghurst. ‘No, not that one of course, but one like it.’

Targost nodded and took the blade, testing its heft and flexing his fingers on the leather-wrapped handle. It felt good in his grip, natural. Made for him.

‘I like it,’ he said and turned to Ger Gerradon.

Like him, Gerradon wasn’t a true son, his features bearing a malnourished sharpness from a Cthonian childhood that no amount of genhancing could ever restore.

‘A loyal member of the lodge and a ferocious killer,’ said Targost. ‘A man born for assault duties. It’s a blow to the Legion to have lost his sword arm.’

‘If I have the truth of it, then Ger will fight alongside his brothers with a new soul within him.’

‘What the Seventeenth Legion call a daemon?’

‘An old term, but as good a word as any,’ agreed Maloghurst. ‘Lorgar’s sons call their twin-flames the Gal Vorbak. Ours will be the Luperci, the Brothers of the Wolf.’

Gerradon’s eyes were open, but unseeing. His lips parted, as though he was trying to speak, and drool spilled onto his chest.

‘Nothing of the man we knew remains,’ said Maloghurst. ‘This will restore him.’

‘Then let’s get it done,’ snapped Targost.

Maloghurst stood before Gerradon, placing a tattooed hand on his scarred chest. Targost didn’t remember the Twisted having tattoos, but recognised their provenance. The books Erebus had shown him, the ancient texts said to have been borne to Colchis from Old Earth, had been filled with stanzas of artes rendered in the same runic script.

‘Be ready with that knife, Serghar,’ said Maloghurst.

‘Have no fear on that score,’ Targost assured him.

Maloghurst nodded and began to speak, but in no language Targost had ever heard. The more the equerry spoke, the less Targost believed it was a language in any sense that he could comprehend.

He saw Maloghurst’s mouth moving, but the motion of his lips wasn’t matching the noise in Targost’s ears; like rusted metal grating on stone, a death rattle and a tuneless singer combined.

Targost coughed a wad of mucus. He tasted blood and spat onto the deck. He blinked away a momentary dizziness and tightened his grip on the stone dagger as the bile in his stomach climbed his gullet. Targost’s eyes widened as noxious black smoke streamed from the blade. The miasma clung to its edges and Targost felt the weight of murder in the dagger’s long existence. The temperature plummeted, his every exhalation visible as a long plume of breath.

‘Now,’ said Maloghurst and the sixteen hooded warriors pulled the captives’ heads back to expose their necks.

Targost stepped towards the nearest, a young man with handsome features and wide, terrified eyes.

‘Please, I just–’

Targost didn’t let him finish and plunged the smoke-edged dagger deep into his throat. Blood fountained from the grotesque wound. The hooded warrior pushed the dying man forward, and Targost moved on, opening one throat after another with no heed of his victims’ horror or last words.

As the last one died, their blood lapped around Targost’s boots and spilled over the edge of the plinth. The chalked symbols drank deeply, and Targost felt a tremor in his hand.

‘Mal…’ he said as his arm lifted the blade to his own throat.

Maloghurst didn’t respond, his lips still twisting in opposition to the unsounds he was making. Targost twisted his head, but the world around him was a frozen tableau.

‘Maloghurst!’ repeated Targost.

‘He can’t help you,’ said Ger Gerradon.

Targost looked into a face alight with malice and perverse enjoyment of suffering. No longer slack with brain death, Gerradon’s features were pulled in a rictus grin. His eyes were milky white and empty, like the unpainted eyes of a doll. Whatever their ritual had drawn from the warp was not Ger Gerradon, but something incalculably old, raw-birthed and bloody.

‘Sixteen? That’s the best you could do?’ it said. ‘Sixteen measly souls?’

‘It’s a sacred number,’ hissed Targost, fighting to keep the blade from reaching his neck. Despite the freezing temperatures, sweat ran in runnels down his face.

‘To who?’

‘To us, the Legion…’ grunted Targost. ‘We’re the Sixteenth Legion, the twin Octed.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said the warp-thing. ‘Sacred to you, but meaningless to the neverborn. After everything Erebus taught you people, you still manage to get it wrong.’

Anger touched Targost, and the blade’s inexorable path to the pulsing artery in his neck slowed.

‘Wrong? We summoned you, didn’t we?’

The thing wearing Gerradon’s flesh laughed. ‘You didn’t summon me, I came back of my own accord. I have so much to teach you.’

‘Came back?’ said Targost. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m hurt you don’t recognise me, Serghar.’