The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Loken lost count of how many he killed.

Not enough, but eventually there were no more to slay.

He was blooded from head to foot. Through the entirety of his killing fury, he felt the presence of another at his shoulder, like a fencing master guiding his every strike. The sound in his helmet was hoarse, echoing, though he was not out of breath.

He blinked away the seconds the slaughter had taken.

Rubio stood amid a pile of corpses, his fists wreathed in killing fire. Cayne’s axe was dripping with gore, and Severian cleaned his combat blade on the robes of a headless corpse. Bror Tyrfingr spat blood not his own and wiped an elbow over his smeared chin.

Qruze and Cayne warily approached Serghar Targost, but Loken ignored the fallen lodge master. Instead, he went to help Ares Voitek and Nohai with the captive Ultramarine. While Voitek’s servo-arms cut through the chains binding him to the deck, Nohai knelt beside him, lifting his head and pressing a hand to the side of his neck.

‘What have they done to you, my friend?’ asked Rubio, tearing off his helmet. The light no longer danced in the crystalline matrix around his head, but the fire in his eyes was banked high.

‘You know him?’ said Loken, seeing recognition in Rubio’s eyes.

‘Proximo Tarchon,’ said Rubio. ‘An officer of the Twenty-Fifth Company. We marched with them on Arrigata, when Erikon Gaius led us.’

Loken recalled that blood-soaked world all too well. He glanced up at Varren and saw he too remembered it. But now was not the time for past regrets.

‘How in the Throne’s name did he end up here?’ asked Loken.

Rubio knelt beside the swaying captive and said, ‘How do any of us end up where we are? Chance, bad luck? The Sons of Horus must have taken him in battle.’

‘So Ultramarines are letting themselves get captured now, are they?’ said Varren, picking the blood from his axe-teeth.

Rubio shot him an angry glare, but didn’t waste words with the former World Eater. Instead, he turned to Altan Nohai.

‘What have they done to him?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Nohai, sliding a data-slug into the threaded sockets cored into Proximo Tarchon’s body. ‘Powerful drugs most likely, but I’ll know more soon. Don’t worry, we’ll get him back.’

Rubio’s fingertip followed the cuts made in Tarchon’s flesh, and Loken felt distinctly queasy at their precise nature.

‘You recognise these?’ asked Loken.

‘I have seen similar markings in primitive tribal cultures the Thirteenth Legion were forced to eradicate during the early years of the Crusade,’ said Rubio, his fists clenched and his voice betraying the depths of his fury. Cold fire shimmered at his hood, and Loken’s breath misted.

‘What are they?’ he asked.

‘Precursors to evocation.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means maleficarum,’ said Bror Tyrfingr, jerking a red thumb back towards Targost. ‘The dead one was trying to raise a wight of the Underverse and clothe it in this one’s flesh.’

‘A simplistic way of putting it,’ said Rubio, holding up a hand to forestall Bror’s rising choler, ‘but essentially correct.’

‘And this isn’t his first time,’ growled Bror. ‘Look at the cut lines. No hesitation, no mistakes. He’s cut them before. On too many other bodies, many other times. Lucky for this one we were here.’

Loken left them to it and returned to where Qruze and Cayne knelt beside the body of Serghar Targost.

The lodge master lay on his back, his hood ripped away by the passage of Karayan’s custom shell. What was left of his head was a splintered mass of leaking brain matter and bent metal fasteners. Bone hooks dangled from flaps of skin and skull fragments. One eye was a pulped scrap of exploded tissue, the other a blood-filled orb that wept red tears.

‘Too easy an end for you,’ said Loken.

‘Samus is here,’ said Targost and sat up.

Qruze fell back on his haunches as the lodge master’s fist punched into Cayne’s throat, tearing through the gorget seals with his bare hands. The former Iron Warrior didn’t have breath to cry out as the ruined, dead thing ripped out the ropy, meat-pipes of his throat.

The blood spray was catastrophic. Life ending.

Cayne fell back, vainly trying to stem the flood as Targost got to his feet. A black flame in the vague outline of a skull filled the ruined space where Targost’s head once sat.

‘Samus is the man next to you,’ he said.