The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

The dying woman. The officer. Her pistol had been something more than just a laspistol. Something considerably more than just a laspistol. He looked down and saw the neat, cauterised hole burned through his plastron and into his chest. He knew if he picked up the rebar that had been jammed in his leg, he’d be able to thread it through the hole in his chest and out through his back without effort.

‘She shot me,’ he said. ‘The bitch shot me.’

‘From what I hear, you let her,’ said the First Captain, shaking his head. ‘Stupid. I’m behind schedule. And now Kibre will likely roll up his flank first.’

Noctua sought the dying woman, but she was already dead. Her head lay at an unnatural angle to her shoulder because that was about all that was left of her after the impact of mass-reactives to the chest.

‘You got away lightly,’ he said.

Abaddon took hold of Noctua’s shoulder guard and spun him around. The First Captain’s Terminator armour gave him a head of height advantage. Noctua looked up into eyes that were like those of a wolf on the hunt, and whose prey was in danger of slipping away.

‘Get your men back in the fight,’ said Abaddon, ‘or I’ll finish what she started.’

‘Yes, First Captain,’ said Noctua.

2

The Knights bore down on the Warmaster, and Raeven had never felt so sure, so righteous in the anticipation of a kill. His arms burned hot with the readiness of his stubber cannons and the crackling energy arcs of his whip.

The warriors who’d ridden to glory before Banelash was his screamed at him, crowding his senses with their echoing war shouts. He heard their voices, a chorus of wordless fury. None of them had ever claimed so grand a kill, and they all wanted to feel what Raeven felt.

He channelled their skill and power, used it.

Banelash was the tip of the wedge, the lance thrust aimed at the Warmaster’s heart. Egelic and Banan held tight to his flanks. Heads lowered, ion shields held out over their hearts.

Reaper chainblades pulled back to strike.

He loosed a wild laugh. He was Imperial commander. The first kill was his to make, and what a kill it would be.

Warriors whose armour looked to be on fire surrounded Horus, but the strangeness of the sight gave Raeven no pause. His sensorium told him more warriors were en route to rescue their leader. They would be too late.

He clenched his fist and a blazing stream of high-energy lasers pumped from his shoulder mount. Four of the black warriors were all but incinerated. The Land Raider was sawn in half.

Horus rose to his feet, and even though he went helmed, Raeven could imagine the fear in his eyes. Banelash cracked its whip and the Warmaster was catapulted into the wrecked Land Raider. Purple arcs of lightning flared from his shoulder and chest as he struggled to rise.

The floating cross hairs of Raeven’s gunsight centred on the amber eye at the Warmaster’s chest.

‘Got you,’ said Raeven as he unleashed the furious power of the weapon he’d saved just for this moment, his thermal lance.

3

Blitzing spears of sun-hot light enveloped Lupercal, but when Aximand blinked away the pinwheeling after-images, he saw only darkness around his lord and master. The Luperci clung to the Warmaster like devotees beseeching an ascending god to stay.

They howled and Aximand felt the day’s heat snatched away.

Time slowed. Not the way it sometimes did in the heat of battle. Not like that at all. In fact, it didn’t slow so much as stop.

The world possessed the quality of timelessness, as though time never had, never would and never could exist here. Galaxies might swirl into being and spin themselves to extinction and it would be the blink of an eye. A blowfly could beat its wings and it would take an eternity to complete the motion.

It bled from the black warriors surrounding the Warmaster, as though they drew from some unfathomable well within them. Or maybe some dreadful power reached through them and allowed a measure of its world to seep into this one.

The bolts of killing power from the Knight’s armaments passed into the Luperci. And vanished. Swallowed whole as though the Twin Flames had become dark windows to another realm of existence.

And then it was over, and Aximand stumbled as the flow of time caught up to him and the world snapped back into focus. He steadied himself on his shield, his heart straining as though pinned in a suit of skin too small for him.

‘What…’

It was all he managed before the Luperci broke their embrace with the Warmaster. Rivulets of black fire clung to Lupercal’s armour, but he was alive.

The Knight leading the charge paused, stupefied that its target wasn’t dead. Its weapons lifted to rectify that upset, but the fractional pause had already cost it its one advantage.

And a fraction was all that Horus needed.

4

I should be dead.

Nerve endings on fire. Pain. Pain like he’d never known.