[Night Lords 01] - Soul Hunter

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

  The smile left her face as quickly as it had arrived.

  “I don’t deny that they are heretics,” Septimus continued, “but let me put it another way. Have you ever heard of Lok III?”

  She reluctantly moved to join him, seated on the Thunderhawk’s gang ramp in the gloom of the spacious hangar bay. Across the cavernous area, other Thunderhawks sat idle and silent, untouched in years. Decades, perhaps. Cargo trucks and munitions loaders sat equally lifeless. Fifty metres away, a lone servitor lay slack and unmoving on its back, its grey skin rendered greyer by the touch of dust. It looked like it had lost power and collapsed, left there to decay in the presence of these venerable war machines. Eurydice couldn’t take her eyes from the corpse. Its skin was withered and drawn tight against its bones, almost mummified, though actual decomposition was probably delayed because of the machine parts fighting off decay in the organic sections that remained.

  She shivered. It was all too easy to see how this ship was a hollow image of itself.

  “No,” she said at length, taking grim comfort in his body heat as she sat next to him. The Covenant was so cold. “I’ve never heard of Lok III.”

  “Not much to hear of,” he admitted, then lapsed into silence, thinking.

  “I’ve not seen much of the galaxy,” she said. “Syne kept most of our prospecting runs within a handful of sectors to save on journey costs. Also, I…”

  “You what?”

  “My family, House Mervallion, is on the lowest tier of the Navis Nobilite. I think Syne was worried about pushing me too hard. Worried his Navigator was of… poor quality.”

  Septimus nodded, with a knowing look in his eyes Eurydice didn’t like. When she expected him to comment on her confession, he merely cut back to his previous line of conversation.

  “Lok III is far distant, close to the region of space known to Imperial records as Scarus Sector.”

  “Half the galaxy away.”

  “Yes. I was born there. It wasn’t a forge world, but it was close. Manufactories covered the planet, and I worked as a hauler pilot, ferrying cargo to and from the orbital docks down to the manufactorum that employed me.”

  “That’s… nice.”

  “No, it was boring beyond words. My point should be obvious. Yes, I’m considered a heretic because of my allegiance. Yes, I am indentured to traitors who make war upon the Throne of Terra. And yes, there’s darkness within this ship that hungers for our blood. But I see things in a realistic light. What I have now is better than death. And once you learn how to walk in the dark places here… it’s almost safe. It’s almost a real life. I lived a life of repetition—another tiny cog in a vast, dull existence. But this? This is different. Every week will bring something new, something incredible, something that takes my breath away. Rarely in a good way, I confess.”

  She looked at him. He was serious.

  “You’re serious,” she said, for lack of anything else to say.

  “I am. As an artificer and a pilot, I’m given a great deal of freedom on the ship. I am valued.”

  “A valuable slave.”

  He narrowed his eyes as he looked at her. “I am trying to keep you alive. If you don’t adapt to this existence, your life ends. It’s that simple.”

  After a long pause, she asked, “Are you happy?”

  “I suspect you think that’s a very insightful and cutting remark.” Septimus gestured around the hangar bay again. “Of course I am not happy. I am a slave to heretical demigods, and I live on a vessel touched by indescribable darkness. The mortal crew lives in fear of the things that stalk the ship’s lightless decks, and those things are not always the Astartes.”

  Septimus chuckled after he said the words, the sound low and devoid of mirth. In his hands, the skull helm grinned up at them both.

  “So how did they take you?” Eurydice asked.

  Septimus didn’t look up from the helm. “They attacked Lok III. I was originally taken to serve as a pilot, and the hyp… hypno—”

  “Hypnotic?”

  “Hypnotic. Yes.” Septimus spoke the word a few more times as if tasting it. “I’m not sure if I forgot that word, or just never knew it. As I said, Gothic was never my first language. But the process was agony. They teach through mental conditioning and hypnotic implantation programs that burn information directly into the mind. That is why I can fly a Thunderhawk—though even after a decade, not with the skill of a true Astartes pilot.”

  She scanned the hangar bay again, imagining how it would look as it should have been: a hive of industry and activity, crew running here and there, servitors and munitions loaders rattling and clanking across the rune-marked floor, the howling of turbines as gunships roared in the moments before launch.

  It must have been so impressive. It was, she hated to admit it, close to what she’d hoped for herself: guiding the vessels of the Astartes across the stars.

  “He has you fixing his armour now,” she said, looking back to Septimus. “Is that a demotion?”

  “Technically, a promotion. Artificers are the most respected serfs in a Legion’s armoury.”

  She laughed, the sound alien and echoing in the hollow hangar bay.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “You’re not exactly up to your neck in respect.”

  “You only say that,” he smiled, “because you have not seen everything Octavia.”

  “Why do you call me that?”

  “Because I am the seventh of my master’s servants. And you are the eighth.”

  “Not likely.”

  “Already your defiance is fading. I hear it in your voice.”

  “You’re imagining it.”

  “That’s a shame.” He rose to his feet, the broken helm in his hands. “Because if I am, you’ll be dying very soon.”

  As Talos confronted the Exalted, and as Septimus spoke with Eurydice, the last vestiges of the orbital battle played out to their inevitable conclusion. Battlefleet Crythe was annihilated, and the few surviving vessels that managed to flee into the warp are of no further relevance to this record, though most distinguished themselves in their own ways when they merged with other sector battlefleets. Consolidation came next.

  The Warmaster’s forces had destroyed the Imperial Navy presence in the area, and his fleet hung in the atmospheric reaches above the penal world, Solace. The insignia displayed by the vessels of his gathered fleet were myriad. The slitted Eye of Horus marked a full seven Black Legion vessels—a massive portion of their mighty fleet—while the fanged skull of the Night Lords was evident on both the Covenant of Blood and its much larger sister ship already among the fleet, the battle-barge Hunter’s Premonition. The majority of the fleet was made up of bulk transports carrying legions of the lost and the damned: Imperial Guard and planetary defence forces that had turned traitor and sworn allegiance to the Warmaster’s cause across recent campaigns. All in all, the Warmaster came to Crythe with the capacity to unleash over two thousand Traitor Astartes and more than a million human soldiers. Pride of place within the fleet was given to the vast hulks belonging to Legio Frostreaver, once of the Mechanicum of Mars. A full Titan Legion at the Warmaster’s beck and call, numbering almost a dozen god-machines of varying classes.

  Such a Chaos fleet was rarely seen outside of the Warmaster’s holy wars against the Emperor’s worlds, and word of this gathering of the Archenemy spread throughout the nearby Imperial planets, with fearful talk of a new Black Crusade in the Despoiler’s name.

  With Solace fallen and the Navy crashed, the war for the Crythe Cluster was only just beginning. Long-range scanners told a grim tale, unnerving even for the captains of this lethal battlefleet. The forge world, Crythe Prime, remained ringed by a vast fleet answering to the Adeptus Mechanicus, which had steadfastly refused to answer Battlefleet Crythe’s hails for help. Curiously, the Marines Errant vessel Severance had withdrawn to Crythe Prime to side with the Mechanicum instead of fighting and dying with the Imperial Navy.

  Time w
as of the essence, and every officer in the Warmaster’s fleet knew it. The Imperium of Man would answer this aggression with fury of its own, and alongside Naval reinforcements, Imperial Guard and Astartes armies would be en route from the moment the first astropathic cries for aid had been sent by the beleaguered Battlefleet Crythe.

  The Covenant of Blood pulled close to its kin-ship, the powerful battle-barge Hunter’s Premonition. The larger ship had been one of the Legion’s flagships before the scattering of the Night Lords over the centuries, and it was an awe-inspiring sight to those who hadn’t gazed upon an example of their Legion’s strength in many years. Even the Exalted, though he was loath to admit it, felt moved by the sight of the princely vessel, a lance of midnight blue edged in gold and bronze.

  He wanted it. He wanted command of that vessel, and all upon the deck saw that need burning in his obsidian eyes.

  The destruction of Battlefleet Crythe was not the only reason the Warmaster had ordered Solace taken first. Just as important as the death of the orbital defenders was the preservation of the population below. Had Lord Admiral Valiance Arventaur been more familiar with the Archenemy—instead of spending most of his career fighting eldar raiders—he might have turned the guns of his beloved Sword of the God-Emperor on Solace itself, destroying the population centres of the penal world and denying the Warmaster his prize. Ultimately, this would have done much more to save the Crythe Cluster.

  But, of course, he had not. He had died with a sword in his heart, whispering incoherent curses at his murderer.

  The Chaos fleet hung in space around a world with almost a million prisoners: rapists, murderers, heretics, thieves, mutants and criminals of a thousand other stripes—all held in appalling conditions and discarded by an Imperium that loathed them for their deviance.

  Within the hour, while the hulks of Battlefleet Crythe were still flaming wrecks in space, the Warmaster’s troopships began their landing. On the surface, hundreds of thousands of potential new warriors watched the skies burn, staring up through the windows of their cells as deliverance—and freedom—came for them.

  VII

  THE SURFACE OF SOLACE

  “Talos. The prophet of the Night Lords. Bring him to me.”

  —Abaddon the Despoiler

  Commander of the Black Legion, Warmaster of Chaos

  Talos and Xarl locked blades.

  The sparring chamber was, like most of the Covenant, a shadow of its former activity. In the centre of the chamber, which was tiered and inclined much like a gladiatorial arena, the two Astartes duelled alone, Talos’ deactivated power sword clashing against Xarl’s stilled chainblade. With respect to the weapons’ machine-spirits, the brothers practised with their own swords instead of practice blades, but kept them unpowered.

  Xarl’s chainsword was a standard-issue Astartes weapon, incredibly tough and resistant to damage, with vicious serrated teeth honed to monomolecular points. But Aurum, the blade taken from a slain captain of the Blood Angels, was a relic of incredible potency. A standard power sword would sunder even an honourable blade like Xarl’s Executioner, and Aurum was closer to an artifact than a weapon. They duelled without the crackling blue fire of the power sword and the roaring whine of the chainblade.

  In a way, it was worse. Their movements reeked of training instead of true battle. Talos always felt the relative silence of sparring to be unnerving and unsatisfying, and it was times like this he dwelled most on how he had been gene-forged and bred for the battlefield. He was a weapon more than a man; never was it more obvious than in the moments of his disquiet.

  By mortal standards, it would have been considered a duel of the gods. The blades sliced the air faster than the human eye could follow, clash upon clash in a storm of relentless speed and force. Had any Astartes been witnessing the fight, they might have seen with a deeper clarity. Both warriors were plainly distracted, their thoughts elsewhere, obvious in every minute hesitation and flicker of the eyes.

  Around them, banks of human-sized passages formed into the arena walls had once housed a small army of combat servitors, engineered for practice and destined for destruction under the blades of the Astartes that came to hone their skills here. Such days were long past. The halls where the servitors had trundled from storage-engineering chambers beneath the arena were silent and lightless, another reminder of a time now gone forever.

  Talos felt his anger swell up as he leaned back and deflected a throat cut. Melancholy was not something that sat well with him. It was alien to his thoughts, yet of late it would cling there like it belonged.

  That made him angry. It felt like a vulnerability in his defences, a wound that wouldn’t heal.

  Xarl sensed the frustration in his brother’s blows, and as their deactivated swords locked again, Xarl leaned in close. Their faces—already similar due to the genetic enhancements that moulded their bodies—glared into one another with mirrored anger. The bitter gaze from their black eyes met as surely as the blades in their hands.

  “You’re losing your temper,” he snarled at Talos.

  “I’m annoyed that I need to go easy on you because of the leg,” Talos growled, nodding almost imperceptibly down at Xarl’s healing limb.

  In response, Xarl hurled his brother back with a laugh, disengaging with surprising grace for one who relied so often on fury to win his fights.

  “Do your worst,” he said, smiling in the darkness. Like all areas of the Covenant of Blood restricted to the Astartes alone, the sparring chambers were utterly light-less. No hindrance at all to the dark eyes of the Nostramo-born, but in former days combat servitors had required night vision visors and aural enhancer sensors to aid with detecting movement.

  Talos came on again, his guard high as he executed a flawless series of two-handed cuts from the left designed to force Xarl onto his right leg more and more. He heard his brother’s pained grunts as he defended himself.

  “Keep it up,” Xarl said, still not even breathing heavily despite the fact they’d been duelling at an inhuman pace for almost an hour. “Still need to get used to taking weight on this leg again.”

  Instead of pressing the attack, Talos stopped.

  “Hold,” he said, raising a hand.

  “What? Why?” Xarl asked, lowering Executioner. He looked around the silent, dark arena, seeing nothing but the empty rows of witness seats, hearing nothing but the dim growl of the ship’s orbital drives, smelling nothing but the sweat from their robed bodies and the faint tang of centuries of weapon oil. “I sense no one nearby.”

  “I saw Uzas kill Cyrion,” Talos said, apropos of nothing.

  Xarl laughed. “Right. That’s good. Are we going to fight or not?” In a moment of uncharacteristic concern, Xarl tilted his head to regard his brother. “Has your head not healed? I thought it was fine.”

  “I am not joking.”

  In the darkness, pierced with ease by the vision of one born on a sunless world, Xarl saw his brother’s black eyes regarding him without a trace of humour.

  “Are you speaking of your vision?”

  “You know I am.”

  “You saw wrong, Talos,” Xarl said, spitting onto the decking. “Cyrion is easy to hate. He is corrupted in the worst of ways. But even a rabid fool like Uzas would never kill him.”

  “Cyrion is true to the Night Haunter,” Talos said.

  Xarl snorted. “We’ve had this argument before. He is an Astartes that knows fear. That is as corrupt as can be imagined.”

  “He understands fear.”

  “Does he still hear the daemon warring within the Exalted?”

  Talos let the silence answer for him.

  “Exactly,” Xarl nodded. “He can sense fear. That is unnatural. He is corrupted.”

  “He senses it. He does not feel it himself.”

  Xarl looked down at his chainsword, silent in deactivation. “Semantics. He has been corrupted by the Ruinous Ones, as surely as Uzas has. But they are still brothers, and I trust them—for now.”
/>   “You trust Uzas?” Talos tilted his head, curious now.

  “We are First Claw,” Xarl answered, if that justified everything. “At least the corruption within Uzas is visible. Cyrion is the dangerous one, brother.”

  “I have spoken to Cyrion about this many times,” Talos warned, “and I tell you, you’re wrong.”

  “We’ll see. Tell me of this vision.”

  Talos pictured again the sight of Uzas, an axe in hand, moving over the rubble of a shattered building, leaping at Cyrion as he lay prone. He explained it to Xarl now, as faithfully as he could, omitting nothing. He spoke of the blaring war horns of the Titans above and the dusty grey stone of the fallen buildings, still magma red in places where the rock had been cooked by the towering god-machines’ guns. He described the fall of the axe, the way it hooked into Cyrion’s neck joint, and the blood that flowed in the moments after.

  “That does sound like Uzas,” Xarl said at length. “A vicious kill, and perfectly made against helpless prey. I am no longer so sure this was a foolish joke of yours.”

  “He despises Cyrion,” Talos pointed out. He moved to the side of the arena, where Aurum’s sheath rested against the metal wall. “But I have been wrong before,” he said over his shoulder.

  Xarl shook his head again. He looked more thoughtful than Talos had ever seen him, which was disquieting purely for its unfamiliarity. It occurred to him for the first time that perhaps Xarl was one of those that invested great faith in his prophetic curse. He seemed almost… unnerved.

  “When?” Xarl said, “A handful of times in how many years? No, brother. This has the stench of unwelcome truth to it.”

  Talos said nothing. Xarl surprised him by speaking more.

  “We all trust you. I don’t like you, brother—you know that. It is not easy to like you. You are self-righteous and you take risks as foolish as the Exalted sometimes. You assume you lead First Claw, yet were never promoted above any of us. All you were was an Apothecary, yet you act like our sergeant now. By the False Throne, you act like the Captain of 10th Company. I have a hundred reasons to dislike you, and they are all valid. But I trust you, Talos.”