[Night Lords 01] - Soul Hunter

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

  And Talos had barely seen him. He’d formed his opinion of the living god from the other side of a cityscape battleground, seeing little more than the juddering images allowed by his helm’s zoomed vision as he sought to assess the Luna Wolves’ front lines. It had been like glancing at a moving painting of an ancient hero.

  He looked at Abaddon. How times change.

  “What do you recall of Warmaster Horus?” Abaddon asked.

  “My eyes hurt in his presence, even from a distance,” Talos said. “I am Nostramo-born,” he added, knowing that would explain everything.

  “You Night Lords. So literal.” The thought seemed to entertain him, which struck Talos as petty beyond belief. Clarity came upon him in that moment. Abaddon was an avatar for what the Traitor Legions had become. Talos watched him now, knowing neither of them were the equals of their primarch progenitors. None of the Legions could make that claim. They were all mere shadows of their fathers, and their fathers had failed.

  The thought was a humbling one, and the weak claws of melancholy reached for his conscious mind again. These encroaching thoughts he dismissed with a scowl, refocusing his attention by acquiring target locks on the weakest points of Abaddon’s armour plating. Precious few existed, but he felt his armour’s machine-spirit responding, awakening again, teased back into anger. It helped him focus.

  “You have still not stated your reasons for summoning me, Warmaster.”

  “I will be blunt, then. After all, we have a crusade to forge in the coming days. Tell me, prophet, have you seen anything of the Crythe War in your recent visions?”

  “No,” lied Talos immediately.

  “No.” The Warmaster narrowed his eyes. “Just… ‘No’. How very declarative.”

  “I have seen nothing that will help you plan, nothing that will bring you new information or aid in any way.”

  “But you have seen something.”

  “Nothing you have any right to know.”

  The claws chimed quietly as they clanged together, Abaddon closing and opening his gauntlet just once. “I am not famous for my patience,” he said slowly, his voice ripe with threat. “But it is enough that my suspicions are confirmed. You are a seer, and you have seen what will come.”

  “You seem to care a great deal about my visions. I thought you had sorcerers of your own.” A streak of amused pride coloured his words. Abaddon didn’t seem to notice, or to care if he did.

  “They are having difficulty piercing the warp’s veil. You, evidently, have done what they cannot. You have witnessed the future. It should not surprise you that a commander would wish dearly for such information.”

  Talos said nothing, knowing what this was building up to.

  “Talos, my brother. I have an offer for you.”

  “I refuse. I thank you for the honour of whatever this offer might have been, but my answer is no.”

  “Why so blatant a refusal?” Abaddon scowled now, the first time he had, and the grimace revealed filthy, blackened teeth behind his bluish lips.

  “If you are offering me the chance to lead the VIII Legion, I refuse because it is an impossible task, and not one within your power to grant. If you are asking me to leave my Legion, I refuse because I have no interest in doing so.”

  “You reject my offer without hearing it.”

  “Your offer will not be in my interests. There is little of any Legion in what remains to us, Warmaster. I no longer believe we will be the death of the Imperium. I no longer believe we are true to our fathers. Corruption has its claws deep within many of us.”

  “Then why do you still fight?” Abaddon’s glower remained, his teeth clenched and his eyes raw in their open glare.

  “Because I have nothing else. I was born to fight, and forged in the fires of war. I am Astartes. I fight because it is right that we fight. The Emperor abandoned the Great Crusade, and demanded humanity pave the way for his ascension to godhood. I don’t expect to topple him from the Golden Throne, but such hubris, such evil, must always be opposed.”

  “And what of Curze?”

  Talos stepped closer, his muscles bunched. “You will not speak his name with such disrespect, Abaddon.”

  “You think you intimidate me, worm?”

  “I think I address your primarch by his title as the First Warmaster, despite his ultimate failure. You will do the same honour for the lord of my Legion, who was vindicated even in death.”

  “Then tell me, what of the Night Haunter? Does his murder mean nothing to you?”

  “The Emperor betrayed my gene-father. Even without the Great Heresy’s ideals, the need for vengeance alone would be enough for me to live my life only to see the Imperium fall.”

  At this, Abaddon nodded again. “I respect the Night Lords as brothers, but you are right. You are a broken Legion.”

  “And you are not?”

  The Warmaster turned, his voice dropping to a threatening murmur. “What did you say?”

  Threat, threat, threat, the rune flickered.

  “Do you fight, Warmaster, because you believe you can still win? After centuries of defeat, after failed Black Crusades, after infighting and war has bled your Legion dry and draped you in ignominy among the other Legions? Is it not true your men are slaved to daemons to make up for the great losses you have sustained since the death of your primarch? You leech strength from other sources, because your own Legion’s might is almost gone.”

  Silence answered this proclamation. Talos broke it again.

  “This meeting is a facet of that. You wonder about how my power will benefit your failing armies.”

  Abaddon might have laughed. It would have been the act of a great leader to laugh, to humour a lesser warrior, to bring him around to his own way of thinking through persuasion and empathy—even were it all false. But Abaddon was not such a leader. He was shrewd enough, at least, to guess Talos would never be fooled.

  The storm bolter barked once. Two shells roared from the muzzles, two bolts thrown by screaming daemon mouths shaped from dirty brass. Talos’ chestplate—the defiled aquila of polished ivory resplendent upon it—cracked under the impact, but it wasn’t the bolts themselves that brought him low. In a burst of inky mist, black gas streamed around him.

  On his knees before he could even blink, his retinal display registered alarms and flashing runic warnings of life signs plummeting. His armour’s machine-spirit was enraged, and he felt the rising desire through his connection junctures to slaughter anything living before him. The Astartes instinct. Defending oneself by killing all threats.

  The machine-spirit of Talos’ armour was a bastardised, hybrid sentience of anger, pride and caution, born from a meshing of the many suits of armour he had cannibalised for use over his years of war. It growled in his blood now, howling through the socket ports in his skull, his spine, his limbs, firing his own rage. He recognised its frustration instantly from the runic display on his visor. It was unable to reconcile depleted life warnings with the insane fact that, somehow, all of the ammunition counters still read at maximum.

  He was wounded without returning fire. This was unnatural. It was not how wars were fought. It had never happened before.

  “Preysight,” he demanded from his armour’s soul. His vision blanketed in thermal vision, a facade of cold blues, but still somehow failed to pierce the choking gas.

  And he was choking. That in itself was insane. Each breath drew in another wisp of the black gas, filtering in through his cracked chestplate, its scent like that of burning tar and its taste like the burned earth a week after a battle. He felt the muscles in his throat and chest spasm, tightening like cables of iron. Life runes flashed in alarm—runes he’d never seen before.

  Poison. He was actually being poisoned.

  “Abaddon!” he roared, immediately horrified at the breathy whisper of his voice. “You die for this.”

  It was when he heard the answering laugh that Talos drew Aurum. It took him an indeterminate number of heartbeats to realise
the blade had fallen from his nerveless grasp to clatter on the wreckage covering the ground. All he tasted was blood and charred soil. All he felt was the cold, cold pain of his lungs going into spasming shock-lock.

  “I have an offer for you, prophet,” the Warmaster’s voice came from somewhere he couldn’t see. He could barely raise his head. He hadn’t even managed to look at the split aquila on his chest and assess the damage to his armour. The draining charts and numbers filtered across his vision told him all he needed to know about his condition.

  Poisoned. How was that even possible? The gas… daemon-mist…

  Kill him before you die.

  The thought rose unbidden from the depths of his mind, and—for a moment—the unfamiliar sense of it left him cold. It was closer to a thought than a voice, an urge rather than an order, and in that doubt lay the answer. This close to death, the machine-spirit of his war-plate pushed easily into his fading mind. It was an invasion of unpleasant pressure, so much colder and more focused than the primal emotions and survival instincts usually massaged against his conscious thoughts. Those were easily ignored; tamed with a moment’s concentration. This was a lance of ice to the brain, strong enough to twitch his limbs in a dying attempt at obeying the words.

  “And,” the Warmaster continued, “if you will not hear this offer from me, you will hear it from my allies.”

  “That was a bolter.”

  As soon as he’d said the words, Cyrion raised his own boltgun and levelled it at the bullish helm of Falkus. “That,” he said again in a lower voice, “was a bolter. Tell me I’m wrong.” He had the audio readout displays of his helm at the edge of his vision to assure him that he was absolutely correct, but he was caught off-guard and needed to buy time.

  The Night Lords and Black Legion squared off in the central aisle, surrounded by a hundred and more kneeling prisoners.

  “Abaddon,” they had been chanting. “Abaddon… Abaddon… Abaddon…” with all the conviction and reverence of a religious rite. But they’d stopped the moment the Night Lords raised their weapons.

  “Storm bolter,” corrected Uzas, and they all heard the smile in his voice. “Not a bolter. Two barrels. Talos is dead. Life rune is unstable.”

  It was true. A single bark of a bolt weapon in the distant mess hall, and the life rune had started flickering on the edge of their retinal displays.

  As the standoff stretched out, the Black Legion Terminators remained impassive. Easy for them, Cyrion thought, backed up by over a hundred fanatics.

  “Talos,” he voxed. Nothing. He switched channels with a blink at the right rune. “Septimus.”

  Again, nothing. He blinked at a third rune. “Covenant, this is First Claw.”

  Silence.

  “We’re being jammed,” he voxed to the squad.

  “Night Lords,” Falkus of the Black Legion murmured. “There has been a regrettable incident with your Thunderhawk. Come. We will provide alternate transportation back to your ship.”

  “Fight them,” Xarl voxed. “Kill them all.”

  “Blood and skulls and souls,” Uzas sounded like he was drooling again. “We must fight.”

  “Keep your damn heads, you fools.” This from Garadon, Hammer of the Exalted. “Even we would be overwhelmed in this place.”

  “Aye,” Cyrion nodded. “We find answers first, then take whatever vengeance is deserved.”

  “Fight,” stressed Xarl. The ignominy of being marched out of here was clearly too much for him. “We can’t leave Talos here.”

  “The Legions stand on the precipice of battle with what happens in this moment,” Garadon’s gruff voice cut into Xarl’s threatened raving. “And they outnumber us in orbit as well as on the surface. Bide your time, and strike when the prey is weakest.”

  “You are a coward, Garadon,” Xarl snarled.

  “And you will answer for that slur,” the Hammer of the Exalted replied. “But lower your bolter. This is not a fight we can win.”

  The Night Lords lowered their weapons and allowed themselves to be escorted from the hall. Jeers and laughter followed them as the prisoners rose to their feet. Several hurled bottles or fired stolen shotguns into the air, triggering alert runes across the Night Lords’ visors.

  “Every single one of these wretches will bleed for this,” Xarl promised. Affirmation blips came back from every member of the squad. A bottle struck Uzas on the side of the helm, and the others heard him laughing.

  “What the hell is so funny?” Xarl snapped.

  “They played us for fools,” Uzas was grinning. “Killed Talos. Killed Thunderhawk crew. Captured our gunship. Clever moves. Is it wrong to be impressed that they outplayed us so easily?”

  “Shut your mouth,” Xarl said. “They didn’t kill Talos. His life rune’s still live.”

  “Same difference. He’s theirs now. Good riddance.”

  Cyrion ignored their bickering. Surrounded as they were by kneeling mortals, his secret sense was afire with sensation. Every one of these humans was afraid beneath their masks of worship. Their fears bled into his consciousness in trickling spurts of conflicting voices.

  …don’t want to die…

  …freedom, at last, will they let us go…

  …a trick, they’ll kill us…

  Cyrion closed his eyes, feeling their mass fear threatening to overwhelm his own thoughts in a sickening blur of barely-understood emotion. As a child, he had fallen into the sump-lake in the depths of Joria Hive’s underhive foundations. Unable to swim, in the endless seconds before his father had saved him, he’d been sinking slowly into the black, staring up at the fire-lit lightness rippling on the water’s surface above. Being around too many humans always reminded him of that one moment, when he’d felt himself fading, swallowed whole and forgotten by some vast extraneous, remorseless force. He’d known he was dying, staring up at the dimming half-light above, feeling everything within his mind slipping from his grasp.

  He knew the same now. The feeling was the same, coming with the familiar cold, dull realisation of inevitability. It was just taking much longer to happen.

  Cyrion’s vision focused as he concentrated on the voices in his vox instead of the whispers within his head. He switched to helm speakers again, letting some of his anger bleed into his tone.

  “You. Son of Horus.”

  One of the Black Legion Terminators turned, still lumbering forwards. “Night Lord?”

  “What, exactly, has occurred to our Thunderhawk?”

  “An event of the most terrible misfortune,” he said, and Cyrion picked up the muted vox clicks as the Black Legionnaires laughed over their internal squad channel. “As a courtesy, we will return you to orbit with one of our own transports,” Falkus said.

  At the end of the hallway, the lift doors rambled open again. An Astartes in black power armour walked towards them, a smile on his pale features and a glint in his dark eyes.

  Cyrion voxed to the others as soon as the newcomer began walking towards them. “You were right after all, Uzas.”

  The Night Lords watched the approaching figure, each one recognising him, each one resisting the urge to aim their weapons and open fire.

  Uzas nodded, still amused. “I told you it was a trap.”

  “My brothers, my brothers,” the newcomer said. The oily pools of his eyes drank them in one at a time. “How it pleases me,” he spoke in fluent Nostraman, “to see you all again.”

  Septimus and Eurydice were still in the cockpit.

  Septimus was both annoyed and worried, though he tried to let neither of these emotions show. In fairness, he wasn’t doing a tremendous job of it. Eurydice could tell the words he occasionally muttered in Nostraman were curses. She was doing an equally poor job of seeming unafraid, but the Astartes had been gone for long enough to set Septimus’ teeth on edge and she found herself infected by his worry.

  The vox had died almost an hour before, as soon as the Astartes had descended into the prison spire. With a sudden, sharp crack of f
eedback, connection had been lost and static was all he’d heard from any of the Astartes since then. That in itself didn’t worry him. He doubted there was anything here that could do the demigods any real harm. He was, however, worried about himself and Eurydice.

  To no avail, Septimus had been trying the vox once every five minutes since it failed. He could reach neither First Claw in the complex below, nor the Covenant of Blood in orbit, and this was starting to smell suspiciously like a trap.

  It was time to consider his options.

  He’d briefly considered taking off and staying on-station by keeping the gunship in hover a few dozen metres above the platform. That, unfortunately, wasn’t viable for two reasons. Firstly, his orders had been to stay where he was. Secondly, even had he broken his orders to take off, Blackened didn’t have the fuel for sustained hovering on its atmospheric thrusters—at least, not if it wanted to break orbit and return to its waiting strike cruiser. The fuel readouts showed, at his best estimate, that he could burn the engines for perhaps fifteen minutes before he would need to return to the Covenant. If his master emerged and needed immediate extraction while he was away, or even while he was burning fuel in an unnecessary hover, they might not make it back into the void.

  No. It wasn’t even worth considering. So with the doors sealed, the gang ramp closed and the weapon turrets trained on the lift building, Septimus waited, eyes narrowed to slits, watching the ship’s sensors and deluding himself into thinking he didn’t look as worried as he was.

  “Will you relax?” Eurydice asked, shattering his self-deception.

  Her boots were up on the control console, and she leaned back into the oversized co-pilot’s chair with creaking squeal of leather. Septimus, by comparison, was arched forward over the auspex display, watching the green pulse sweep over the screen every six seconds. It pulsed outwards from an icon of Blackened in the centre of the screen.

  She made a noncommittal grunt, trying to get his attention.

  “What?” he said without looking. Another pulse.

  “You’re worried.”

  “Something like that.”