Void Stalker

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  It wasn’t enough. Not even close. The spinning knives took him in the chest, crunching deep as they bit, and black fire burst across his armour.

  The witch-queen held her hand to recall the throwing star. As it flashed through the air, Talos broke it in half with a swing of his power blade. The maiden tried to wrench her spear back out of Lucoryphus’s belly, but the Raptor gripped the haft in his metal claws, keeping it lodged inside his body and the stone ramparts beneath.

  The prophet was on her a heartbeat later. She weaved aside from the first swing, and the second, and the third, leaping back and dodging each ponderous carve. Despite moving faster than the human eye could follow, his heavy swings wouldn’t land.

  On another flip, her wounded leg gave out again. Talos swept her leg out from under her as she staggered to recover her balance, and at last Aurum struck home. The golden sword cleaved through her right arm, severing the limb close to the elbow.

  She shrieked, then – an unamplified shriek of pain and frustration that sounded almost mortal. Dirty alien blood hissed and crackled as it burned away on the blade.

  Her reply was a firm-fingered chop to the soft armour at his throat, crunching the cables there and thudding into his larynx hard enough to kill a human outright. It was enough to make him fall back, raising his blade defensively, struggling to catch his breath.

  Talos felt his head snap to the right from a blow he never saw coming, and had a brief glimpse of Lucoryphus on his back, like some kind of iron-skinned helpless testudeen reptile, turned over on its shell.

  The sword flew from his grip, kicked from his hand by a bloodstained boot. Another kick smashed into the scarred aquila on his chestplate, hurling him backward, barely keeping his balance. The combat narcotics flooding his muscles did nothing; he couldn’t block her, he couldn’t dodge her – he could scarcely even see her.

  ‘Preysi–’

  His own sword interrupted him as it crashed against his helm. Pain flared white-hot, cobwebbing out from his temple in the same moment his arc of vision halved. Before he could even process the notion he’d been blinded in one eye, the blade hammered home again. It slid into his chest with a loving lack of haste, stealing all breath, all energy, all thought, beyond one truth.

  She killed me with my own sword.

  He laughed without a sound, spraying flecks of blood into his helm. When she dragged the blade free, he first thought she’d cast it aside; instead, she broke it across her knee.

  The pain burrowing through his chest finally embraced his spine, clinging with fervour. That’s when he fell – but only to his knees. Somehow, that was worse.

  ‘So falls the Hunter of Souls,’ she said, pulling her helm off to stare down with slanted, milky grey eyes. She’d have been beautiful, had she not been so disgustingly inhuman. One of her ears twitched in the rain, as sensing a sound only she could hear.

  He rose to his feet again, removed his own helmet, and looked out at another vision finally coming true.

  The details were close. Not perfect, but so very close. His fevered mind had coloured places with ancient memory, making the fortress appear still standing in desolate glory, rather than the tumbled ruin he saw now.

  But the rest was so clear, he had to smile. Talos took a step closer to her, and stooped despite the flare of agony in his chest, reaching to pick up the broken blade.

  ‘In my dreams,’ he breathed, ‘you still had your helm on.’

  She nodded – a slow and grave acknowledgement. ‘In the dreams of Ulthwé’s seers, they saw the same. Fate is fluid, Hunter of Souls. Some futures cannot be allowed to pass. There shall be no Prophet of the Eighth Legion. There shall be no Night of Blood, when the Tears of Isha are drunk by your thirsting brethren. You die here. All is well.’

  He held a hand to his ruptured chest, feeling the aching beat of at least one heart. His breathing was tight, but his redundant organs had come to life, sustaining him past mortal death.

  The maiden walked to pull her spear from Lucoryphus’s chest. The Raptor made no movement beyond a limp twitch.

  As she moved back to him, her black spear in her remaining hand, dream and reality melted together, becoming one at long last.

  XXX

  LESSONS

  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, draining down the wall’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, is it not? 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?’

  Talos 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.

  Malcharion would not be proud, he thought.

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

  He couldn’t stand. Even pride has limits over what it can force from a body. 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. Battle stimulants ran thick in his blood.

  The maiden came closer, even daring to rest the scythe-bladed tip of her spear on his 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 long, ember-red hair was dreadlocked by the rain, plastered to her pale features. She looked like a woman sinking into water, serene as a saint while 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 didn’t need to wonder if she was still smiling. He saw it on her face, and loathed the kindliness of the gesture. Was it sympathy? Truly?

  On his knees, atop the fallen 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 heavy 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.

  ‘I saw this,’ he told her. ‘Didn’t you?’

  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 strained 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 weathered, sunken battlements, a broken blade in hand.

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

  He moved first to where Cyrion lay. The throwing star had left almost nothing of his chest, its black fire eating much of the bone and meat of his sternum and the organs beneath. He removed Cyrion’s helm with a careful touch brought on as much by his own wounds as respect for the dead.

  Talos blinked when Cyrion’s hand gripped his wrist. His brother’s black eyes rolled in their sockets, seeing nothing, trailing raindrop tears in mimicry of the lightning bolts on his faceplate.

  ‘Uzas,’ Cyrion said. One lung quivered in the exposed crater of his chest. One heart still gave a weak pound.

  ‘It’s Talos. Uzas is dead.’

  ‘Uzas,’ Cyrion said again. ‘I hate you. Always hated you. But I’m sorry.’

  ‘Brother.’ Talos moved his hand before Cyrion’s eyes, with no reaction. The blindness was complete.

  ‘Talos?’

  He took Cyrion’s hand, gripping his arm wrist-to-wrist. ‘I’m here, Cy.’

  ‘Good. Good. Didn’t want to die alone.’ He sank back against the stone, relaxing in his hunched lean. ‘Don’t take my gene-seed.’ He reached up a hand to touch his own eyes. ‘I… I think I’m blind. It’s the wrong kind of dark here.’ Cyrion wiped a trickle of spit from his lips. ‘You won’t take my gene-seed, will you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t let Variel take it, either. Don’t let him touch me.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Good. Those words you said. About the war. I liked them. Don’t pass my gene-seed on. I’m… done with the war… as well.’

  ‘I hear you.’

  Cyrion had to swallow three times before he could speak again. ‘Feel like I’m drowning in spit.’

  He wasn’t – it was blood. Talos said nothing about it, either way. ‘Septimus and Octavia got away.’

  ‘That’s good. That’s good.’ Cyrion drooled blood through a loose smile, his body starting to twitch with the onset of convulsions.

  Talos held him still as he shivered, saying nothing. Cyrion filled the silence, as he always did.

  ‘I’m dying,’ he said. ‘Everyone else is dead. The slaves escaped. So…’ he breathed out slowly, ‘…how are you?’

  Talos waited for the last breath to leave his brother’s lips before gently closing Cyrion’s eyes.

  He took three things from the body – no more, no less.

  Lucoryphus was a motionless husk. Talos gave the corpse a wide berth, making his way to Variel.

  The Apothecary was far from dead. The prophet caught up with him as he crawled, straining and legless, across the stone. Becoming crippled from the knees down hadn’t improved his demeanour at all.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ he said to Talos, who promptly ignored him. The prophet dragged him to the ramparts, a little more shielded from the rain.

  Several compartments of Variel’s narthecium were open, their contents dispensed, mostly into the Apothecary’s bloodstream.

  ‘I won’t die,’ he told Talos. ‘I have staunched the flow of blood, eliminated the risk of sepsis and other infections, applied synthetic skin and armour sealant, while also–’

  ‘Shut up, Variel.’

  ‘Forgive me. The stimulants in my system are volatile and strong by virtue of their emergency requirements. I am not used to–’

  ‘Shut up, Variel.’ Talos clasped his brother’s arm, wrist-to-wrist. ‘I’m going after her.’

  ‘Please do not endanger your gene-seed.’

  ‘In truth, you’ll be fortunate if it survives intact.’

  ‘That grieves me.’

  ‘And if you ever escape this cursed world, leave Cyrion’s gene-seed untouched. Let him rest in peace.’

  Variel tilted his head in the rainfall. ‘As you wish. Where is the gunship? Will it be returning?’

  ‘Goodbye, Variel. You’ll do the Eighth Legion proud. I do not need to be a prophet to know that.’ He gestured to Variel’s belt, at the pouches, the bandolier and ammunition straps. ‘I will take those, if you do not mind.’

  Variel allowed it. ‘How will I leave Tsagualsa if the gunship does not return me to Deltrian’s vessel?’

  ‘I have a feeling some of the Legion will come one night, to see what happened here for themselves.’

  ‘A guess?’ Variel started tapping keys on his vambrace.

  ‘A good guess,’ Talos replied. ‘Goodbye, brother.’

  ‘Die well, Talos. Thank you for Fryga.’

  The prophet nodded, and left his last living brother in the rain.

  She came for him when she could no longer hear the cold iron hunter-craft in the air, when distance had at last swallowed its engine-roar. She moved from the shadows, sprinting down the battlements, her spear held loosely, with perfect balance, in her remaining hand.

  Silken hair streamed back in a sword-dancer’s tail, kept out of her eyes as she ran. Ulthwé’s banshee shrine had needed her, and to Ulthwé’s banshee shrine she’d come. The division between the craftworld’s seers was an unfortunate one, as was the separation of forces that followed.

  Few of the other Path shrines would walk with her, no matter their respect for the armour she wore and the bla
des she bore. They would not leave Ulthwé so undefended, and thus, the armada had been a thin and hollow enterprise, populated by wraiths, with few able to risk setting foot on the unholy world.

  Losses this eve had still been grievous. Ulthwé could ill afford to lose so many to the blades of blasphemers, but the Hunter of Souls was fated to fall, before he could become the Bane of Isha at the dawning of the Rhana Dandra.

  So it was written. So shall it be.

  In all the years since her most recent Becoming, few events had shown the portents aligning as fiercely those speaking of this very night. The very rightness of her actions, and the gravity of her cause, leant speed and strength to her aching limbs.

  This time, he was hunting her, in his own slow, limping way. The blade in his hands rang with ancient resonance, the crude metals used in its forging dating back to the Humans’ Hubris, when their arrogance burst open the Gate of Sha’eil like a great eye in the heavens. She did not fear it. She feared nothing. Even her damaged accoutrements would manifest whole once more, when the fates aligned.

  She ran faster, the rain cold on her skin, the blade high in her hand.

  Talos offered no resistance.

  The black spear cleaved through him, finishing the work his own sword had started in her hands. He didn’t smile, or curse, or whisper any last testament. She kept him at arm’s length, the impaling spear forcing him back.

  As the sword dropped from his grip, Talos opened his other hand. The grenade in his fist activated the moment his fingers slipped from the thumb-plate. It exploded, triggering the three grenades he’d taken from Cyrion, the two he’d taken from Variel, and the power generator on his back.

  With the exception of the fire that incinerated half of an alien immortal’s physical form, Talos Valcoran of Nostramo died much the same way he’d been born: with black eyes open, staring at the world around, and silence on his lips.