Void Stalker

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Regarding continuity, as more of the Horus Heresy comes to light in the New York Times bestselling Horus Heresy series, the lore of the Warhammer 40,000 universe undergoes subtle shifts in scope. In Soul Hunter, it was claimed that the Warband of the Broken Aquila had experienced a century of time passing since the Horus Heresy, due to the vicissitudes of the warp.

  In keeping with the new revelations and detail regarding the Traitor Legions during the Scouring, I’ve changed that slightly to maintain consistency. Void Stalker contains references to how much time has passed for Talos and First Claw, settling the issue much more firmly in the newly established lore of those ancient, war-torn eras.

  It’s a minor change, and one I suspect most readers wouldn’t even notice, but consistency matters to me – hence this note.

  I just wanted to say thanks in advance for your indulgence.

  ‘I have seen a time when the Imperium can no longer breathe.

  When Man’s empire chokes on its own corruption,

  Poisoned by the filth and sin of five hundred deluded generations.

  On that night, when madness becomes truth,

  The Gate of Cadia will break open like an infected wound,

  And the legions of the damned will spill into the kingdom they created.

  In this age at the end of all things,

  Born of forbidden blood and fate’s own foul humour,

  Will rise the Prophet of the Eighth Legion.’

  – ‘The Crucible Premonition’ recorded by an unknown VIII Legion sorcerer, M32

  PROLOGUE

  RAIN

  The prophet and the murderess stood on the battlements of the dead citadel, weapons in their hands. Rain slashed in a miserable flood, thick enough to obscure vision, hissing against the stone even as it ran from the mouths of leering gargoyles, draining down the castle’s sides. Above the rain, the only audible sounds came from the two figures: one human, standing in broken armour that thrummed with static crackles; the other an alien maiden in ancient and contoured war plate, weathered by an eternity of scarring.

  ‘This is where your Legion died, isn’t it?’ Her voice was modulated by the helm she wore, emerging from the death mask’s open mouth with a curious sibilance that almost melted into the rain. ‘We call this world Shithr Vejruhk. What is it in your serpent’s tongue? Tsagualsa, yes? Answer me this, prophet. Why would you come back here?’

  The prophet didn’t answer. He spat acidic blood onto the dark stone floor, and drew in another ragged breath. The sword in his hands was a cleaved ruin, its shattered blade severed halfway along its length. He didn’t know where his bolter was, and a smile crept across his split lips as he felt an instinctive tug of guilt. It was surely a sin to lose such a Legion relic.

  ‘Talos.’ The maiden smiled as she spoke, he could hear it in her voice. Her amusement was remarkable if only for the absence of mockery and malice. ‘Do not be ashamed, human. Everyone dies.’

  The prophet sank to one knee, blood leaking from the cracks in his armour. His attempt at speech left his lips as a grunt of pain. The only thing he could smell was the copper stench of his own injuries.

  The maiden came closer, even daring to rest the scythe-bladed tip of her spear on the wounded warrior’s shoulder guard.

  ‘I speak only the truth, prophet. There’s no shame in this moment. You have done well to even make it this far.’

  Talos spat blood again, and hissed two words.

  ‘Valas Morovai.’

  The murderess tilted her head as she looked down at him. Her helm’s crest of black and red hair was dreadlocked by the rain, plastered to her death mask. She looked like a woman sinking into water, shrieking silently as she drowned.

  ‘Many of your bitter whisperings remain occluded to me,’ she said. ‘You speak… “First Claw”, yes?’ Her unnatural accent struggled with the words. ‘They were your brothers? You call out to the dead, in the hopes they will yet save you?’

  The blade fell from his grip, too heavy to hold any longer. He stared at it lying on the black stone, bathed in the downpour, silver and gold shining as clean as the day he’d stolen it.

  Slowly, he lifted his head, facing his executioner. Rain showered the blood from his face, salty on his lips, stinging his eyes. He wondered if she was still smiling behind the mask.

  On his knees, atop the battlements of his Legion’s deserted fortress, the Night Lord started laughing.

  Neither his laughter nor the storm above were loud enough to swallow the throaty sound of burning thrusters. A gunship – blue-hulled and blackly sinister – bellowed its way into view. As it rose above the battlements, rain sluiced from its avian hull in silver streams. Heavy bolter turrets aligned in a chorus of mechanical grinding, the sweetest music ever to grace the prophet’s ears. Talos was still laughing as the Thunderhawk hovered in place, riding its own heat haze, with the dim lighting of the cockpit revealing two figures within.

  The alien maiden was already moving. She became a black blur, dancing through the rain in a velvet sprint. Detonations clawed at her heels as the gunship opened fire, shredding the stone at her feet in a hurricane of explosive rounds.

  One moment she fled across the parapets, the next she simply ceased to exist, vanishing into shadow.

  Talos didn’t rise to his feet, uncertain he’d manage it if he tried. He closed the only eye he had left. The other was a blind and bleeding orb of irritating pain, sending dull throbs back into his skull each time his two hearts beat. His bionic hand, shivering with joint glitches and flawed neural input damage, reached to activate the vox at his collar.

  ‘I will listen to you, next time.’

  Above the overbearing whine of downward thrusters, a voice buzzed over the gunship’s external vox-speakers. Distortion stole all trace of tone and inflection.

  ‘If we don’t disengage now, there won’t be a next time.’

  ‘I told you to leave. I ordered it.’

  ‘Master,’ the external vox-speakers crackled back. ‘I…’

  �
�Go, damn you.’

  When he next glanced at the gunship, he could see the two figures more clearly. They sat side by side, in the pilots’ thrones. ‘You are formally discharged from my service.’ He slurred the words as he voxed them, and started laughing again. ‘For the second time.’

  The gunship stayed aloft, engines giving out their horrendous whine, blasting hot air across the battlements.

  The voice rasping over the vox was female this time. ‘Talos.’

  ‘Run. Run far from here, and all the death this world offers. Flee to the last city, and catch the next vessel off-world. The Imperium is coming. They will be your salvation. But remember what I said. We are all slaves to fate. If Variel escapes this madness alive, he will come for the child one night, no matter where you run.’

  ‘He might never find us.’

  Talos’s laughter finally faded, though he kept the smile. ‘Pray that he doesn’t.’

  He drew in a knifing breath as he slumped with his back to the battlements, grunting at the stabs from his ruined lungs and shattered ribs. Grey drifted in from the edge of his vision, and he could no longer feel his fingers. One hand rested on his cracked breastplate, upon the ritually broken aquila, polished by the rain. The other rested on his fallen bolter, Malcharion’s weapon, on its side from where he’d dropped it in the earlier battle. With numb hands, the prophet locked the double-barrelled bolter to his thigh, and took another slow pull of cold air into lungs that no longer wanted to breathe. His bleeding gums turned his teeth pink.

  ‘I’m going after her.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool.’

  Talos let the rain drench his upturned face. Strange, how a moment’s mercy let them believe they could talk to him like that. He hauled himself to his feet, and started walking across the black stone battlements, a broken blade in hand.

  ‘She killed my brothers,’ he said. ‘I’m going after her.’

  I

  THE LONGEST DREAM

  ‘Because we are brothers. We’ve seen primarchs die to blade and fire, and we’ve seen our actions set the galaxy aflame. We’ve betrayed others and been betrayed in kind. We’re bleeding for an uncertain future, fighting a war for the lies our lords tell us. What do we have left, if not blood’s loyalty? I am here because you are here. Because we are brothers.’

  – Jago Sevatarion, ‘Sevatar’, the Prince of Crows

  As quoted in The Tenebrous Path, chapter VI: Unity

  The prophet’s eyes snapped open, bleaching his vision with the monochrome red of his tactical display. The familiarity was a comfort after the madness of the dream. This was how he’d seen the world around him for most of his life, and the dancing target locks following his gaze were a welcome extension of natural sight.

  Already, the nightmare fled before him, elusive and thread-thin, unravelling as he sought to hold onto it. Rain on the battlements. An alien swordswoman. A gunship, shooting up the black stone.

  No. It was gone. Shadows remained, images and sensations, nothing more.

  That was happening more often, recently. The visions refused to stick with any tenacity, whereas once they’d melded to his memory. It seemed to be a side effect of their increasing frequency, though with no understanding of his gift’s genesis and function, he had no way of knowing the truth of the matter.

  Talos rose from where he’d collapsed on the floor of his modest arming chamber and stood in silence, tensing his muscles, bunching them and rolling his neck, restoring circulation and checking the interface feeds of his armour. The ceramite suit of layered war plate – some of it ancient and unique, some of it plundered much more recently – whirred and growled in rhythm with his movements.

  He moved slowly, carefully, feeling the quivering strain of muscles too long locked. Cramps played along his limbs, all except his augmetic arm which responded sluggishly, its internal processors only now realigning with the impulses from his waking mind. The bionic limb was still the first section of his body to come back into full obedience, despite its halting sphere of motion. He used it, the iron hand gripping at the wall, to haul himself to his feet. Armour joints snarled at even these minor motions.

  The pain was waiting for him back in the waking world. It crashed against him now, the same torture that always spiked through his blood like a toxin. He murmured breathless, defiant syllables behind his faceplate, uncaring how the words were vox-growled to the empty chamber.

  The dream. Were they destined to be deceived, or destined to be the deceivers? Fate often played them the latter hand. The Exalted had said the words so many times: Betray before you are betrayed.

  No matter how he reached for the dream, it dispersed ever further. The pain wasn’t helping. It flooded back as if filling the hole in his memory. On several occasions in the past, the pain had been severe enough to leave him blind for entire nights. This eve was only just shy of the same torture.

  He hesitated as he reached for his blade and bolter. They both rested as they should: racked against the wall and bound in place by strong leather straps. This, however, was rare. Talos was many things, but fastidiously tidy was not one of them. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d returned to his room, replaced his weapons in perfect order, and promptly passed out comfortably in isolation. In fact, he couldn’t ever recall it happening before. Not even once.

  Someone had been in here. Septimus, perhaps, or his brothers when they’d dragged him from wherever he’d been when he fell prey to the vision.

  Still, they’d never concern themselves with something as mundane as restoring his weapons to their racks. Septimus, then. That made sense. Uncommon behaviour, but it made sense. It was even laudable.

  Talos pulled his weapons free before fastening them to his armour. The double-barrelled bolter mag-locked to his thigh, and the ornate golden blade sheathed at his back, ready to be drawn over his shoulder.

  : come to the bridge

  The words peeled across his visor display, spelled out in distinct Nostraman runes, clear white on the background red-tint like any other measure of tactical information or bio-data. He watched the cursor flicker at the end of the final word, blinking almost expectantly.

  Quintus, the fifth of his slaves, had been rendered mute through battlefield injury. They’d communicated during the serf’s years of service via hand signs or text uplink from a hand-held auspex to Talos’s armour systems, and usually a fair degree of both at once. Quintus, much like Septimus, was a good enough artificer that a little inconvenience was a small price to pay.

  : prophet

  : come to the bridge

  Quintus, however, had never behaved so informally. He was also decades dead, slain by the Exalted in one of Vandred’s many crazed outbursts.

  Talos’s retinal display responded to his desire, opening a vox-channel to First Claw.

  ‘Brothers.’

  They answered, but without anything resembling cohesion. Xarl’s laughter machine-gunned across the vox-waves, followed by the others cursing and screaming oaths in equal measure. He could hear Mercutian’s whisperingly polite swearing coming through clenched teeth, and the throaty chatter of bolters in their fusillade drumbeat.

  The channel went dead. He tried several others: the strategium, Deltrian’s Hall of Reflection, Septimus’s armoury, Octavia’s chamber, and even Lucoryphus of the Bleeding Eyes. All dead. All silent. The ship thrummed on, evidently active and running at speed.

  He perversely relished these first pricklings of unease. It took a great deal to unnerve any of the Eighth Legion, and the ship’s sudden emptiness was a pleasant mystery. He had the amusing feeling of being hunted, and it sent a smile creeping across his pale lips. This must be what his prey felt like, though he’d hardly lose control of his muscles and babble meaningless prayers to false gods the way humans usually did.

  : i am waiting

  Talos drew his sword and left his chamber.


  He was far from shocked to find the bridge abandoned. It was no more than a minute’s travel from his chamber on the deck below, but the Echo of Damnation’s central spinal thoroughfares were similarly empty when he’d passed through them.

  The strategium was an expansive oval of gothic architecture, populated by leering gargoyles and sculpted grotesques clinging to the walls and ceiling. Here, a mutilated angel with eyes wrapped by barbed wire roared voicelessly at the central throne; there, a bat-winged daemon spread its pinions across the ceiling above the secondary gunnery platforms. The artistry involved in the Echo’s construction never failed to captivate him – for all the Eighth Legion’s flaws as disciplined warriors, the Night Lords had managed to breed a few scholars and craftsmen with the same skill shown by the artisan-knights of the Emperor’s Children and the Blood Angels. No matter their individual skills in craft, most Eighth Legion vessels were decorated with blasphemous relish, depicting tortured divinities and captive daemons across the architecture.

  A central throne rose above all else, its immense bulk aimed at the occulus viewscreen. Above the occulus, a Legionary’s broken skeleton was bound, crucified in place, hanging on chains.

  In concentric circles around it were the banks of navigation, gunnery and operation stations. No robed heretic priests muttered their way between control tables. No uniformed crew relayed orders or adjusted settings. No branded servitors hardwired into their restraint thrones chattered and drawled their status reports in machine voices.

  This was surely a dream, though it matched no vision he’d ever seen before. No other explanation fit.

  ‘I am here,’ Talos said aloud.

  : you have been dreaming many dreams

  : now you are close to waking once more

  : sit brother

  He didn’t smile. He rarely did, even when amused, though it was most definitely amusing to be told to take a seat in his own command throne. Talos complied, even if only to see what would happen.