Void Stalker

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Marlonah limped into the rainstorm, closing her eyes and letting the cool water rinse her body of hours of sweat. She felt like weeping. Running her hands through her soaking hair was a pleasure she couldn’t put into words.

  The Dreadnought preceded her, but took no similar joy. The war machine dragged one leg, scraping sparks with every step and leaving a mangled engraved path along the ground. Its armour-plating was blackened in places, melted to sludge and hardened again in others, or riddled with silver shuriken discs like misaligned fish scales. His joints no longer whirred with confident, heavy grinding – they crackled and sparked and clanked, as gears and servos slipped across each other’s loose teeth, finding only occasional purchase.

  The construct walked onward, out onto the battlements, both its arms lowered and loose. Dozens of cables linking the sarcophagus to the main body were severed, either venting vapour, leaking fluid, or simply dried up completely.

  She didn’t know how many of them Malcharion had killed during their journey and ascent. They’d come at him with chainswords, with knives, with pistols, with rifles, with laser weapons and projectile-throwers and claws and spears, and even rocks and curses. He showed the impact of every single one of them on his ruined adamantite hull.

  ‘I heard a gunship…’ the Dreadnought growled. ‘I… I will contact it. Talos’s human slaves. They will come back for you. Then. Then I sleep.’

  On the battlements ahead of them, she saw the devastated body of a legionary slumped against one wall, his armour burned black and every joint melted and fused. Smoke rose from the corpse, tangling with the downpour.

  Closer to where they walked, one of the alien maidens still moaned and crawled across the stone. She only had one arm, the other lost to savage burn wounds, and one leg that ended below her thigh. The other was nowhere to be seen. All hair was seared from her body, as was most of her flesh. She writhed and groaned and bled, shivering and twitching in the rain.

  ‘Jain Zar,’ she whisper-croaked, struggling to speak with a scorched tongue. ‘Jain Zar.’

  Impossibly, the only unharmed part of her body was her left eye, which watched Marlonah with sour, sentient malice.

  ‘Jain Zar,’ the dying alien rasped again.

  Malcharion crushed the living wreckage under his armoured foot, smearing it across the battlements. He lifted a protesting arm on whining joints, to gesture to the legionary’s corpse.

  ‘I… have to finish everything… for that boy.’

  EPILOGUE PRIMUS

  NAMES

  The slaves huddled together in the darkness, the male cradling the female. It wouldn’t be long now. Their confines shivered as the shuttle rose, labouring on its way back into the atmosphere.

  The evacuation began five days before, when the Navy’s first envoy made planetfall. A hundred other refugees sat in the near-dark, speaking in quiet voices, several weeping with relief, others with fear. The people of Darcharna had never left their world. Even those taught to cherish the distant Imperium as their saviour were bound to be frightened now they were finally in the empire’s less than tender care.

  The slaves had spent two long months in the Last City. Two months of lying to blend in with the other survivors; two months of hiding her third eye; two months of hoping Variel wouldn’t appear in the doorway of their scavenged shack. She dreamed of that confrontation all too often, picturing his red eye lenses, hearing the snarl of armour joints. She always woke the moment his gloves of cold ceramite stroked across her belly.

  But he never came.

  In quiet moments, she still recalled Talos’s words: ‘If Variel escapes this madness alive, he will come for the child one night, no matter where you run.’

  But where was he? Had he fled Tsagualsa with Deltrian after all? She didn’t dare believe they were safe from Variel’s knives, but she was beginning to hope.

  Octavia’s hands rested on her stomach. The baby would be with them soon – a month or two at most. She wondered if he’d be born in the void, like that poor girl on board the Covenant, or if she’d first breathe the air of whatever world they’d call home once they’d lied their way through Imperial processing.

  He’d agreed to act as a manual worker from one of the smaller southern cities. She was going to claim descent from the planet’s original Navigators, from the colony fleet four hundred years before. It still amused her, in her calmer moments, to think that with Navigator biology, her story was technically the more likely one. She doubted she’d have any difficulty with whatever dubious authority finally processed the survivors of Darcharna. As a Navigator – precious as she was – they’d be likely to send her to a stronghold of the Navis Nobilite in a nearby sector, but pilgrims and refugees were one of the Imperium’s many lifebloods. Losing themselves among the teeming billions would be no trouble.

  They’d be fine, she knew, as long as the Inquisition didn’t get involved.

  Octavia nodded to Marlonah across the cargo hold. She nodded back, returning a nervous smile. It’d been good to have her around these last months, and she shared Octavia’s amusement that all three of them only still lived because the Legion had – at various points – saved their lives. Such bizarre behaviour from soul-sworn murderers. Even after a year and more in their company, she’d never understood any of them.

  Well. Perhaps Talos.

  For the first time in longer than she cared to remember, she let let her thoughts drift to the future.

  ‘I just had a thought,’ she said, in a strange voice.

  Septimus kissed her sweaty forehead. ‘What is it?’

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean. Your real name, before you were the seventh.’

  ‘Oh.’ Septimus smiled, and though she had no hope of seeing it in the dark, she heard the grin in his whisper. ‘Coreth. My name was Coreth.’

  Eurydice – once Octavia – tasted the word, then turned to taste his lips. ‘Coreth,’ she said, her mouth against his. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  EPILOGUE SECUNDUS

  THE MONTHS OF MADNESS

  [EXCERPT BEGINS]

  …from the rogue trader vessel Quietude, that the eldar of Segmentum Obscura name that specific date “the Night of Sacred Sorrow”, with no record of…

  [EXCERPT ENDS]

  [EXCERPT BEGINS]

  …personally report contact lost with subsector guild interests on thirty-seven worlds, nine of which still remain dark. We await the reports of scout vessels and Imperial Navy forces in the area, but…

  [EXCERPT ENDS]

  [EXCERPT BEGINS]

  …don’t trade there, anymore. Rumours of warp storm geneses, and temperamental tides. It’s not worth the money in repairs. The Iago’s Navigator went blind…

  [EXCERPT ENDS]

  [EXCERPT BEGINS]

  …without confirmation of this “sizeable Archenemy fleet” on the Eastern Fringes, it is a fool’s crusade to petition for…

  [EXCERPT ENDS]

  [EXCERPT BEGINS]

  …Golar, the second world of the system of the same name, simply no longer exists in any habitable capacity. The population of the capital city was recorded in the last referenced census as four million. Extensive planetary tectonic activity left the city…

  [EXCERPT ENDS]

  [EXCERPT BEGINS]

  …which is why, if you will heed the archival data, you will see fluctuations in the quality of astropathic contact, alongside severe…

  [EXCERPT ENDS]

  [EXCERPT BEGINS]

  …is meaningless. Tell the Mechanicus representative that we’ve scryed the region twice now, at a cost in fuel and crew lives I struggle to tally without a cogitator…

  [EXCERPT ENDS]

  [EXCERPT BEGINS]

  …in the region of one of the dead w
orlds, but no recognised Imperial tongue…

  [EXCERPT ENDS]

  [EXCERPT BEGINS]

  …Viris colratha dath sethicara tesh dasovallian. Solruthis veh za jass…

  [EXCERPT ENDS]

  EPILOGUE TERTIUS

  PROPHET OF THE EIGHTH LEGION

  1

  The prophet looked up as the bulkhead opened on squealing hinges. He wasn’t surprised to see who stood there.

  ‘Apothecary,’ he said without a smile. ‘Greetings.’

  The Apothecary avoided all eye contact. ‘It is time,’ he said.

  The prophet rose to his feet, hearing the healthy grind of his armour joints. ‘I presume the others are already waiting?’

  The Apothecary nodded. ‘They will join us on the way. You are ready?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then let us go. The council is already in session.’

  As they walked the winding, twisting hallways at the heart of the Sun’s Scourge, screams and moans sounded in the distance, on the many decks below. The prophet let his gauntleted hand brush along the ornate steel walls.

  ‘I will claim a ship like this one night,’ he said.

  ‘Is that a prophecy,’ the Apothecary replied, ‘or a hope?’

  ‘A hope,’ the prophet confessed. ‘But it seems likely, if all goes well tonight.’

  The two of them continued walking, their armoured boots thudding on the decking. Soon enough, they were joined by a third figure. This one wore the same midnight-blue ceramite, though its helm was a sloping, snarling daemon mask. Twin tear trails graced its face, painted in scarlet and silver. The figure crawl-walked on all fours, hunched over and loping along behind them like a loyal hound.

  ‘Variel,’ the newcomer said in a burst of crackling vox. ‘And hail to you, prophet.’

  Variel said nothing, though the prophet inclined his head in greeting. ‘Lucoryphus,’ he said. ‘Have you spoken to the other Bleeding Eyes?’

  ‘Yes. Over three hundred of the cult have attended the gathering. I spoke with several Bleeding Eye leaders among the other warbands. A dozen other cults are also in evidence. All is well. A gathering of the rarest significance, I believe.’

  ‘True enough.’

  They walked on, heading deeper. Variel occasionally checked the readings from his narthecium gauntlet, adjusting dials seemingly on a whim. The prophet didn’t bother to ask what was occupying the Apothecary’s mind. Variel’s thoughts were forever his own; he was not a man that enjoyed sharing counsel.

  The three figures soon joined another two; both of these stood in hulking suits of Terminator war plate, their tusked, horned helms lowering in respectful greeting. The Legion’s winged skull stood proud on their curving shoulder guards.

  ‘Malek,’ said the prophet. ‘Garadon. It is good to see you again.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Garadon said. An immense war maul was slung over one shoulder.

  ‘We would be nowhere else,’ Malek added. His massive gauntlets carried the scythe-like claws retracted in armoured housings.

  ‘Not meeting with the other Atramentar?’ asked the Raptor, now crawling above them, hanging on the ceiling.

  ‘That can come after this,’ Malek replied. ‘The survivors of the old First Company have precious little to say to one another, these nights. Meetings always degenerate into duels over their warlords’ respective strengths.’

  ‘The cults are the same. As are the Legions themselves.’ Lucoryphus seemed amused by the idea. ‘Your decades in the Maelstrom were ill spent if you believed anything would change.’

  ‘The Maelstrom,’ Garadon chuckled. ‘An entertaining guess. How little you know, screecher.’ Malek simply snorted, not quite an argument, and left it at that.

  Malek and Garadon fell in alongside the prophet, flanking him as they marched three abreast down the labyrinth of corridors. Variel allowed himself to drift behind. The prophet’s entrance should be alongside two of the Legion’s most respected Atramentar warriors. He had no wish to debate the point.

  They came, at last, to the council chamber at the very heart of the ship. The sound of raised voices and cursing could be heard even through the sealed bulkhead.

  ‘Do they scream or laugh?’ Lucoryphus rasped.

  ‘Both,’ said Malek, hauling the door open.

  The group stalked into the chamber, joining one of the largest gatherings of Eighth Legion commanders in ten thousand years.

  2

  For almost three hours, the prophet simply listened in silence. His attention drifted from figure to figure around the central table, drinking in the details of their armour, their terror markings, their warpaint and the stories scratched across ceramite in burn marks, scars and dents.

  The Legion’s gathered lords and sorcerers were as divided as ever. Many called out for allegiance, no matter how temporary, to Abaddon’s rising Crusade. This would be the Thirteenth, and the first with a goal to truly wound the Imperium’s fortress world of Cadia beyond recovery. Others called out for patience and discretion, letting the Black Legion bear the brunt of the initial assaults while the Night Lords devoted themselves to raids away from the front lines.

  Still more would hear none of it, refusing to join the Black Crusade, no matter the prize or threat of retribution. They were souls who’d abandoned the Long War, living only for themselves and the glory they could claw from existence as raiders.

  The prophet didn’t judge any of them, no matter their choices – courageous or craven, wise or wasteful, all of them were his brothers, for better or worse.

  Talk turned to individual assaults. What fleets could strike where. What slivers of tactical intention the Despoiler had revealed so far. How best to capitalise on it for success against the Imperium, or as a means of betraying the Black Legion and cannibalising false allies in the name of spoils.

  When the prophet finally spoke, it was a single word.

  ‘No.’

  3

  The Night Lords didn’t fall silent immediately. Several arguments raged too hot, too loud, for an immediate quiet to descend. Instead, those nearest the prophet turned to him with cautious eyes. The lords and their honour guards – some of warriors, some of Terminators, some of Raptors – watched with sudden and cold interest, as the unknown lord spoke at last. Thus far, he’d not even named himself, yet many of those present recognised the warriors at his side.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked the nearby lord whose tirade the prophet had interrupted.

  The prophet stepped forward, taking a place at the table. ‘I said “No”. You asserted that you will stand triumphant at the coming battle in the Alsir Divide. You will not. You will die aboard your command ship, mutilated and screaming in rage. Your final thoughts will be to wonder where your legs and right arm have gone.’

  The lord hissed something low and vile through his helm’s vocaliser. ‘You threaten me?’

  ‘No, Zar Tavik. I do not. But I have seen your death. I have no reason to lie.’

  The named lord barked a laugh. ‘No reason? Perhaps by keeping me away, you hope to secure the victory there for yourself.’

  The prophet lowered his helm, conceding the point. ‘I am unwilling to argue. Where you die means nothing to me.’

  Silence was spreading around the table now, as infectious as a foul scent. One of the other commanders, a Raptor in silvered war plate, turned his daemon mask to the prophet.

  ‘And how do I die, seer?’

  The prophet didn’t even turn to look at the Raptor. ‘You die here, Captain Kalex. This very night. Your final thoughts are of disbelief.’

  There was a moment’s hesitation. Kalex’s claws closed around the hilts of his sheathed chainswords.

  ‘And how could you possibly know such th–’

  The Raptor crashed back from the table, blood spattering those nearest him
. Malek of the Atramentar lowered a double-barrelled bolter, smoke coiling from its brazen mouths.

  ‘As I said,’ the prophet smiled.

  Lords nearby were edging away from him now; some in caution, others readying weapons. Kalex was one of the few to lack an honour guard. No warriors pulled iron in a bid to avenge him. Instead, a tense silence flooded the chamber, rippling out from the prophet and his brothers.

  ‘Many of us will fall in the coming Crusade, whether we swear allegiance or abstain entirely.’

  ‘Seize the moment…’ Lucoryphus’s voice came over the vox.

  The prophet pointed to lord after lord, each in turn.

  ‘Darjyr, you will be betrayed by the Word Bearers at Corsh Point, when they leave you to face the Imperial blockade alone. Yem Kereel, you will fall in the last charge at the Greson Breach, against the Subjugators. You will be succeeded by your lieutenant, Skallika, who will be killed three nights later, when his Land Raider is toppled by a Titan and overrun by Guard platoons. Toriel the White Handed, the Legion will consider you lost to the warp when you leave here, swearing never to fight under what you call Abaddon’s “slave mark”. The truth is close; you are attacked by one of your own Claw leaders while under way in the warp, and as you lose your hold on your ship’s path, the Sea of Souls floods into your warship.’

  On and on, the prophet spoke, until a full third of the gathered warriors had been named as doomed to die in the coming Black Crusade, or while they abandoned it.

  ‘This war will cost us. We will pay in blood and souls, night after night. But the price will be victory. The Imperium’s defences will be broken, and we will never need to sneak and fight our way from the Eye again. The empire’s throat shall be forevermore bared to our blades. That is what Abaddon offers us.’

  ‘He’s offered us the same thing before,’ one of the lords called.

  ‘No,’ Lucoryphus hissed. ‘He hasn’t. The other Crusades were merely crusades. The Despoiler left the Eye to achieve whatever Black Legion madness he wished to achieve. This one is different. It will be a war. We will break Cadia, and forever after be free to raid the Imperium at will.’