The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

‘It’s a draugrjúka,’ said Bror Tyrfingr.

Seeing the looks of confusion among his fellow pathfinders, Bror shook his head and said, ‘Don’t you people understand Juvik?’

‘Juvik?’ asked Rubio.

‘Fenrisian hearth-cant,’ said Tubal Cayne. ‘It’s a stripped-down, simplified language. No subtlety to it – punchy and declarative, just like the warriors that speak it.’

‘Have a care, Tubal,’ warned Bror, squaring his shoulders. ‘A man could take offence at that.’

That seemed to confuse Cayne. ‘I don’t see how. Nothing I said was untrue. I’ve met enough Space Wolves to know that.’

Loken expected anger, but Bror laughed. ‘Space Wolves? Ha, I forgot that was your idiot name for the Rout. If I didn’t think you were being completely serious I’d rip your arms off. Stay by my side and I’ll show you just how subtle a Space Wolf can be.’

‘So what’s a draugrjúka?’ asked Loken.

‘A ghost ship,’ said Bror.

5

A grey-robed servile with augmetic implants worn around her skull like a tonsure had met the pathfinders in the docking bay, and she now led them aboard the Tarnhelm. The vessel’s interior was stripped back, with only the barest minimum of fitments that would allow it to carry crew.

Its astropath was kept in sealed cryo-stasis, and its Navigator had yet to be implanted in the tapered cupola on the dorsal section. The long-axis of the ship was a cramped dormitory, with alcoves serving as medicae bays, equipment stowage and sleeping areas. Individual crew compartments were set towards the rear of the craft, with a slender nave reaching from the communal areas of the ship to its tapered prow.

Rassuah made her way towards the bridge, while the rest of the pathfinders stowed their equipment in cunningly arranged lockers and weapon racks.

The Knights Errant had been extant only a short while, too short for any real traditions to bed in, but a custom that had been readily adopted was for each warrior to retain a single artefact from his former Legion.

Loken thought back to the battered metal crate in which he had kept his meagre belongings; the garrotting wire, the feathers and the broken combat blade. Junk to any other eyes than his, but there had been one item whose loss had grieved him.

The data-slate Ignace Karkasy had given him, the one from Euphrati Keeler. That had been a treasure beyond value, a record of the time when the universe made sense, when the Luna Wolves had been a byword for honour, nobility and brotherhood. Like everything else he had once owned, it was gone.

He snapped his chainsword into the locker’s blade rack, careful to fix it in place. Its blade was fresh from a manufactory city in Albyon and inscribed with a boast that it was warranted never to fail.

Just like the thousands of others forged there.

His bolter was no different, the product of manufactories geared for war on a galactic scale, where the ability to mass-produce reliable weaponry was of far greater importance that any considerations of individuality. Lastly, he placed the mirror tokens Severian had given him into the locker. Loken had thought about throwing them away, but some fatalistic instinct told him that he might yet have need of them.

He closed the locker, watching as the rest of his pathfinders stowed their gear. Tubal Cayne unpacked a piece of surveying gear, a modified theodolite with multiple auspex capabilities, Rama Karayan a rifle with an elongated barrel and oversized sight. Ares Voitek had his servo-harness with its burnished gauntlet icon, and Bror Tyrfingr stowed what appeared to be a leather cestus gauntlet of entwined knotwork with ebon claws like knife blades.

Callion Zaven appeared at Loken’s side, opening the locker next to him and slotting home a custom-worked boltgun with a clawed wing motif acid-etched onto its platework. Within the Luna Wolves, such weapons had been for officers, but the killing fields of Murder had shown Loken that many of the warriors in the III Legion wielded heavily embellished armaments.

Zaven saw Loken’s attention and said, ‘A poor effort, I know. Not a patch on my original bolter.’

‘That’s not your touchstone?’

‘Throne, no!’ said Zaven, unbuckling his hand-tooled leather sword belt and holding it between them ‘This is my touchstone.’

The sword’s handle was tightly wound golden wire, its pommel an ebony talon. The quillons were swept eagle wings with a glittering amethyst mounted at the centre of both sides.

‘Draw it,’ said Zaven.

Loken did so, and his admiration for the weapon increased tenfold. The weapon had heft, but was incredibly light. The handle and setting had been wrought by human hand, but the blade had never known a smith’s hammer. Curved like a Chogorian sweep-sword and milky white, dappling to a jaundiced yellow at its edge, the blade was clearly organic.