[Night Lords 01] - Soul Hunter

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

  The Exalted listened to its prophet’s voice more than the actual words he spoke. Talos sounded calm, but there was a hard edge of irritation in the Astartes’ tone. They were cut off from their pod, and it would evidently take too long to fight through the panicked crew.

  It nodded its horned head as it relayed the orders to a servitor manning one of the lance gunnery stations. “You. Servitor.”

  “Yes, lord.”

  “Lock a single lance on the three decks beneath the main bridge of the enemy flagship. Cut at the angles I am transmitting now.” It tapped a blackened claw on a number pad mounted on the arm rest of its throne. “Break off fire after exactly one-point-five seconds.”

  Yes, that should be enough. Penetrate the hull. Cut deep, excise the metal meat, without doing too much damage. Tear a chunk of hull away, and expose the command decks to the void. It might just work, too.

  It would be a shame to lose the prophet if this failed.

  “Lord,” spoke one of the mortal officers. The Exalted noted with only faint interest that the man still wore his old Imperial Navy uniform, from over a decade ago.

  “Speak.”

  “Servitors in Bay Five report a Thunderhawk is readying to launch. It requests clearance.”

  The Exalted nodded again. It had been expecting that. “Let it go.”

  “Servitors also report, Exalted one, that the crew is not Astartes.”

  “I said to give them clearance,” the Exalted burbled, low and wet, saliva stringing between its fangs.

  “A-as you say, lord.”

  The Exalted turned to the gunnery servitor it had addressed before.

  “Ready, lord,” the servitor murmured.

  “Fire.”

  * * *

  The ship shuddered again, more violently than ever before.

  “That was close,” said Xarl. His suit’s stabilisers kicked in, but he’d almost had to grip the arching wall of the passageway for support. First Claw had withdrawn to the command decks, no longer seeking to carve their way through fleeing human crew elsewhere. Here, in the darkness of the halls webbing beneath the bridge chambers, the Night Lords sheathed their blades and locked their bolters to thigh guards with magnetic seals. The ship’s lighting here was dead, a legacy of the lord admiral’s murder and the wounding of the Sword’s machine-spirit, and four pairs of crimson eye lenses glared out into the blackness, seeing everything in crystal clarity.

  Distantly, as the ship’s tremor subsided to a background shudder again, Talos’ helm auditory sensors picked up a faint sound wave: a series of metallic clangs, faded with distance.

  “You hear that?” Xarl asked.

  “Bulkheads closing,” Cyrion acknowledged.

  “Move faster,” Talos ordered, and the squad broke into a run, their heavy boots thundering on the steel decking. “Move much faster.”

  Dimly, in his right ear, he heard a familiar voice.

  “Master?”

  The Night Lords sprinted through the blackness, rounding several corners and smashing aside the few crew that lingered, hiding and panicking, in the darkened hallways.

  “The squad,” Talos breathed into his vox mic, “is using frequency Cobalt six-three.”

  “Cobalt six-three, acknowledged, master.”

  “Confirm our location runes.”

  “Locator runes sighted on my augury screens. Lord Uzas’ rune is flickering and weak. And… Lord, the ship is breaking apart, with eighty per cent damage to the—”

  “Not now. Has the Covenant fired?”

  “Yes, master.”

  “I thought so. We seek the closest deck to the voided sections of the command levels.”

  The silence stretched for five seconds. Six. Seven. Ten. Talos could imagine his servant scanning the hololithic display of the degrading grand cruiser, watching the locator runes of First Claw as they navigated the tunnels.

  Twenty seconds.

  Thirty.

  Finally… “Master.”

  The shuddering was so violent that both Cyrion and Uzas were thrown from their feet. Talos staggered and left a dent in the hull where his helm crashed into the metal. The ship was coming apart now. No question.

  “Master, stop. The left wall. Breach it.”

  Talos didn’t hesitate. The wall—which looked no different from any other in their headlong flight through the dark passageways of the command decks—exploded under the anger of four bolters.

  Beyond the wall, just for a moment, was fire.

  Beyond the fire was nothing but the infinite night of space, sucking the four warriors into the void with a greedy breath.

  Pain flooded him.

  Talos looked down… up… at the planet below… above. A dreary rust-red rock decorated by thin wisps of cloud cover. He wondered what the air would taste like.

  Stars spun past his field of vision, and he stared without truly seeing.

  Then, a slowly-turning cathedral, a palace of stained glass and a hundred spires, on the back of the burning Sword. He saw none of this, either.

  Blackness took him for a moment, which blessedly dulled the pain. When it passed, he tasted blood in his mouth, and was blinded by the bright warning runes flashing across his vision. He tried to vox Cyrion, Xarl, Septimus… but couldn’t recall how to do it.

  Pain, like light from a rising sun, bloomed in his skull again. Voices spoke in his ears.

  “Armour: void sealed,” one of the runes said. Talos tried to move, but wasn’t sure he could. There was no resistance to his movements, no traction to anything he did, to the point he wasn’t sure he was moving at all.

  His vision turned once more, revealing pinprick stars and shards of metal spinning slowly nearby. It was difficult to see clearly, and that worried him more than anything else. One of his eye lenses was darker than it should be, blurry and black-red with dim, watery runes. Blood, he realised. There was blood in his helm, coating one of his eye lenses.

  One of the voices resolved into something approaching clarity. It was Xarl, and Xarl was swearing. Xarl was evidently swearing about blood.

  Talos’ vision turned, and then he saw Xarl suspended by nothing, drifting in the blackness, his brother’s skulls on chains floating around his armour like a dozen moons orbiting him. He felt thunder, a powerful tremor, as Xarl’s reaching hand slammed into his chest.

  “Got him,” Xarl grunted. “Hurry up, slave. My leg’s smashed to hell and I’m bleeding into my armour.”

  Septimus’ voice came from the garbled darkness. “I’m drifting in now.”

  “Do you have the others?”

  “Yes, lord.”

  “Confirm you have Uzas.”

  “Yes, lord.”

  “Huh,” Xarl’s voice lowered. “Shame.”

  Talos, now blinded by the blood smearing both his lenses, gripped Xarl’s wrist as his brother held him. He felt his senses refocusing, and although he was sightless, the unearthly silence and weightlessness told him all he needed to know. He was in space, without any propulsion, turning in the darkness without any control at all.

  “This,” he said through gritted teeth, “was the stupidest idea I’ve ever had.”

  “Glad you’re still alive,” Xarl laughed, his voice hard and edged. “You should have seen the way you hit your head on the way out.”

  “I can feel it now.”

  “Wonderful. You deserve it. Now shut up and pray that accursed little runt you trust doesn’t crash our damn Thunderhawk.”

  VI

  AFTERMATH

  “If there is nobility remaining within Konrad’s Legion, then it is hidden deeply beneath too many layers of twisted lusts, deviance, and disobedience. Their ways are foolish, ill-considered and a hindrance to the orderly flow of controlled war. The time is coming when the Night Lords must answer for their behaviour and be brought back into the doctrine of Imperial warfare, lest we lose them to their own deviant hungers.”

  —The Primarch Rogal Dorn,

  Recorded commentary a
t the Battle of Galvion, M31.

  Ten minutes after First Claw had destroyed the wall separating them from the vacuum of space, the four of them stood in the strategium of the Covenant of Blood, arranged in a half-crescent at the base of the Exalted’s raised throne. Two of the Atramentar—Malek and Garadon again, Talos noticed—flanked the former captain, their weapons deactivated but held at the ready.

  The Exalted paid little attention to the mundane aspects of the orbital war now. The beauty of its void dancing was done, and it merely awaited the accolades due for its boldness. For now, the Exalted was content to let its under-officers move the ship into the formations of the larger battle and add the strike cruiser’s formidable guns to the onslaught.

  Battlefleet Crythe was finished. The Resolute and the Sword of the God-Emperor were well on their way to becoming burned-out wrecks in orbit around Solace, and the lesser ships were being savaged by the overwhelming firepower of the Warmaster’s fleet.

  The deck shook as the Exalted nodded its acknowledgement down at the four warriors of First Claw.

  “Nicely done,” the creature said.

  Talos was bareheaded. His helm had been mauled in the final escape from the burning Sword, when the pull of the void had crashed his head against the breached wall as he was sucked out into space. Xarl was limping and favoured his right leg—he’d almost lost it in the same instant that Talos had narrowly escaped decapitation—and even his enhanced Astartes physiology was straggling to re-knit bones that had almost been reduced to gravel. Cyrion and Uzas were physically unharmed, but Cyrion’s internal organs were still tense and working in frantic heat from the brief time in the void. His war-plate had been compromised by an unlucky shotcannon spread that had damaged his chestplate, and he’d needed to hold his breath for several minutes once his armour had vented all air pressure in space. Uzas, with a lucky streak the other three had long begun to curse, was grinning, utterly unscathed.

  “You are insane, Vandred.” Talos spoke up to the command throne on its raised dais. His shaven head was a mess of scabbing and dried blood-trails as his gene-enhanced Larraman cells clotted his blood at the wound on his crown.

  Immediately, the atmosphere soured. Both of the Atramentar brought their weapons to bear: Malek hunched the shoulders of his brutish Terminator war-plate, and thick claws slid, crackling with force, from the armour’s oversized gloved fists. Garadon’s hammer hummed with building energy as it sparked into life.

  Talos might have been handsome had he been left as a man. With his enlarged Astartes features, he’d ascended from the ranks of classical humanity, but there was still something recognisably imposing and inspiring in the way he looked. His black eyes, stony with rage, glared up at the Exalted, and Talos had no idea just how much he resembled a sculpted marble statue from the heathen ages of Old Earth.

  “What did you say, my prophet?” the Exalted asked, purring the way a contented lion might.

  “You,” Talos pointed up at the altered figure with Aurum, “are insane.”

  The ship shivered under the attentions of Imperial guns. No one paid attention, except for the mortal crew at their stations that ringed the unfolding scene between their masters.

  The Exalted licked its fangs. “And by what leap of the imagination do you arrive at such a conclusion, Talos?”

  “There was no need for such risks. I heard about Fifth Claw.”

  “Yes, a shame.”

  “A shame?” Talos almost went for his bolter. His hesitation was evident in his body language, for Malek of the Atramentar stepped forward. Both Cyrion and Xarl raised their bolters and aimed at the elite guards either side of the throne. Uzas did nothing, though they all heard the chuckling from his helm speakers.

  “Yes,” the Exalted said, utterly unfazed by the standoff. “A shame.”

  “We lost five Astartes in a single operation. For the first time in millennia, 10th Company is below half-strength. We have never been so weak.”

  “10th Company,” the Exalted smirked, preening and condescending. “10th Company has not existed for millennia. We are the warband of the Exalted. And this night, we have earned much honour in the eyes of the Warmaster.”

  The confrontation would change nothing. Talos lowered his blade, letting his anger bleed from him like corruption from a lanced boil. He buried the urge to blood his sword with the life fluids of the Exalted. Sensing the change in him, Cyrion and Xarl lowered their bolters. Champion Malek of the Atramentar stepped back into position, his tusked helm watching impassively.

  “Fifth Claw is no more,” Talos said more quietly. “We are in dire need of recruitment. We cannot function for long with barely forty Astartes.”

  He let the unwelcome words hang. Every one of them knew the decades of attention and effort recruitment would require. To sustain a company’s fighting strength, it needed a great deal of materiel and expertise to gene-forge new Astartes from prepubescent male infants. The Covenant of Blood lacked almost all of what would be required, which was why no recruitment had been done since the Great Betrayal. The remains of 10th Company had been fighting with the same warriors since the Horus Heresy.

  “Change is inevitable,” the Exalted growled. “The Shaper of Fate is with us, and it knows the truth of this.” At those words, the Atramentar both nodded their heavy helms in respect. Uzas granted a monosyllabic sound that could have been respect or pleasure. Talos felt his skin crawl, and his dark eyes narrowed.

  “Who are we to answer the demands of the Ruinous Ones? We are the Night Lords, the sons of the eighth primarch. We are our own masters.”

  “The Shaper of Fate demands nothing,” the Exalted said. “You do not understand.”

  “I have no wish to understand the entities you are enslaved to.”

  The Exalted smiled, patently false, and waved a clawed gauntlet. “I am tired of reminding you, Talos. I control this. Now leave before First Claw joins Fifth in no longer existing.”

  Talos shook his head at the threat, disgusted it had even been made, and smiled back before stalking from the strategium.

  Once they were outside the bridge, Cyrion voxed to Talos. “He is worse than before.”

  “As if that was possible.”

  “No, brother. His fear. I can feel it boiling beneath his skin. He is losing the fight with the daemon that shares his body.”

  Septimus and Eurydice were still in the port hangar bay.

  The Thunderhawk Blackened sat on its landing pad, occasional jets of pressurised steam venting from its ports as the raptor-like gunship cooled. The boosters at the rear of the troop-carrying attack ship matched the gunship’s name, the engine exhausts charred from decades of orbital and sub-orbital flight. Septimus was diligent in ensuring Blackened remained in as good a condition as could be expected, but he was an artificer first and foremost, not a tech-priest. His skills lay in repairing and maintaining the master’s weapons, not keeping an ancient gunship flying.

  Eurydice watched the slave as he sat on the deck of the landing bay in the shadow of the Thunderhawk, turning his master’s skull-faced helm over in his hands.

  “This,” he said to himself, “is not going to be easy.”

  It was a miracle the helm hadn’t come to pieces: it was severely dented on the left side where Talos’ head had smashed into the edge of the breached wall once the vacuum had pulled First Claw into space. Eurydice said nothing. She was still unnerved by the shaking of the ship, and replayed the last hour over and over within her mind. Powering up the Thunderhawk… Taking it out into the middle of an orbital battle… Throne, this place was insane.

  Septimus looked up at her, his jade eyes narrowed. She wondered if his thoughts matched her own. As it happened, they did.

  “It’s not always that bad,” he said without a smile.

  She grunted what might have been an agreement. “Is it ever worse?”

  “Often,” Septimus nodded. “If you think the Astartes are bad, wait until we go to the crew decks.”

&nb
sp; She didn’t answer. She didn’t want to know.

  Septimus held up the oversized helm once more. “I should get started on this.” But he didn’t move. He was lingering, she knew.

  Finally, she bit. “You’re not allowed to leave me alone.”

  “The only way you may leave my presence is if one of us is dead.”

  Her forehead, and her permanently sealed third eye, ached with sudden ferocity. It felt as though her warp-gaze sought to stare through the steel and slay the foolish, cocky slave before her.

  “I hate it here,” she said, before she even realised she was going to speak.

  “We all hate it here,” he nodded again, speaking slowly, and not just because of his awkward Gothic. He spoke as if stating the obvious to a slow child. “We all hate it here, more or less. We are worthless to them. They are demigods.”

  “There are no gods but the Emperor,” Eurydice sneered.

  Septimus laughed at that, and his casual blasphemy grated against her. “You are a heretic.” She said the words softly, but unpleasantly.

  “As are you, now. Do you think the forces of the Throne would welcome you after even a short time on board a Traitor Astartes vessel?” His humour faded. “Open your eyes, Navigator. You are as ruined as the rest of us, and this ship,” he gestured at the dimness of the launch bay around them, “is your home now.”

  She drew breath to argue, and he held up a hand, cutting her off.

  “Enough arguing. Listen to me.”

  He let the skullish helm rest on his lap as he scratched the back of his neck. “This is the 10th Company of the VIII Legion. Thousands of years ago, they would have had serfs and servitors and Astartes enough that me taking a relic Thunderhawk out into the black would have been punishable by death. They lack resources, including the souls to serve them.”

  “A fitting fate,” Eurydice smiled coldly. “They’re traitors.”

  “You think that smirk you wear hides your fear.” He met her eyes and stared for several moments. “It doesn’t. Not from me—and definitely not from them.”