“When will they get back?” Another pulse, still nothing.
“Do I look like they involve me in their plans?” he laughed, though the sound was forced.
“Just asking. What are you worried about, anyway?”
“The prison below us. Specifically, the inmates.” He nodded to the data-slate resting on the arm of his chair. Its display screen listed a screed of information in tiny green letters. “This is Internment Spire Delta-Two,” Septimus explained. “The prisoners kept here are awaiting execution, though they are kept alive to serve a span of years in deep tunnel mining operations as slave labour. These aren’t recidivists or minor criminals. They’re murderers, rapists and heretics.”
“But the doors are sealed.” An edge of hesitancy crept into her voice now, just a thin suggestion of doubt.
“No door is invulnerable. The flank bulkheads would stop anything I can imagine, but the main gang ramp works through regular hydraulics. It’s sealed and locked, but… Look, I’m not worried. Just being prepared.”
“Prepared for what, exactly? Why would anyone rush an Astartes gunship? Talk about a death wish.”
“I don’t know. I expect most wouldn’t come near us. If they did? Well, maybe some might want to try and flee the planet by stealing the ship. Or maybe, given their incarceration here, they’re not all that sane to begin with. Or…” he trailed off.
“Or what? Don’t just start a sentence like that and leave it hanging.”
He shrugged. “Maybe if they had learned there was a woman on board…”
She nodded, but he could see she was struggling to maintain her bravado. “This gunship has, well, guns, right?”
“It… does.”
“I don’t like the way you said that.”
“Half of the weapons are inactive, including the main battle cannon. Ammunition is low, and the heavy bolters on the gunship’s flanks are no longer slaved to servitors.”
“Why not?”
Another pulse. Another blank screen. “Because the servitors are dead. They have been for years, and I was the one tasked with dragging the bodies from their ports.”
After several moments of silent staring another console screen chimed. Septimus turned in his throne, leaning forward to examine the readout.
“Well, well, well…”
“More bad news?” she asked him, not sure she really wanted an answer.
“Not exactly. Another ship just took off—and not one of the bulk landers down there on the plains. This ship was a Thunderhawk-class vessel. Black Legion identification signals.”
“Meaning?”
“The auspex chimed because it registered First Claw on board the ship as it headed into orbit.”
“What? They left us here?”
Septimus was still watching the screen. “Not all of them. No signal from Talos. He’s still in the prison complex.”
He was not a man who enjoyed these kinds of mysteries. Septimus turned from the screen to hit a few console keys. Doors: Secured, a flashing icon on the console read. It was the third time he’d checked the doors in the past hour.
As Eurydice drew breath to ask another question, the auspex chimed again. There was nothing foreboding in the sound. It was almost melodic.
“Damn it,” said Septimus, rising from his throne.
Eurydice sat up. The auspex was singing now, tinny chime after tinny chime. “Are we in trouble?” she asked.
Septimus was staring out of the forward window, at the open elevator doors, and what came spilling out of them.
“Oh, absolutely,” he said, drawing both of his pistols.
“Then give me one of those,” she said as she stood, following his gaze.
“Take them both,” he said, handing them to her before leaning over the control console. “And don’t think about shooting me.”
She gave him a withering look that he never saw. Septimus hit a long sequence of console keys, his fingers a blur.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“This,” he said, and the gunship’s functioning heavy bolter turrets lit up with fire as they unleashed their rage.
Jerl Maddox couldn’t believe his luck. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom after eight years in this damn hellhole. Eight years of eating the cold, bitter grey paste that passed as food, morning, afternoon and night. Eight years of fourteen-hour shifts under the earth of this accursed rock, digging and digging and digging in the vain hope of striking a handful of ore. Eight years of backaches, blurred vision, gums burning from infection, and pissing blood after every beating from the guards.
Yeah, well, payback had come sure enough. He clutched the shotgun to his chest, racking the slide just to enjoy the feeling. Click-chunk. Oh, hell yes. This was something else. He’d taken the weapon from Laffian, but that was all good because Laffian had been one of the worst guards in R Sector.
R Sector—“Omega Level Transgressions Only”—was home no longer for Maddox, and the fact he could still feel Laffian’s blood on his face was just that little extra touch of victory.
That was payback, too. Payback for the time Laffian had smacked Jesper around so bad the poor fool’s eye had popped out from his broken head. Maddox grinned, the stench of his teeth making his eyes water. Laffian hadn’t looked so cocksure with his chest blown open and his leg hacked off at the knee.
He’d screamed about his kids, too. Yeah, like that would make a difference. Maddox’s grin became a snigger.
“Shut your mouth, Blackjaw,” someone next to him said. Maddox swallowed, pressing his lips together. In the close confines of the lift car, which was an uncomfortable fit for almost fifty of them, several of the men curled their lips or swore at him in granting monotone.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, but that just got them complaining again. It wasn’t his fault. His gums were infected. His teeth were black and loose in his jaws—the few that remained, anyway. Wasn’t like they had access to a doctor in R Sector, was it? And they smelled just as bad, anyway. Fifty of them all sweating and bloody in their white overalls…
“You stink, too,” he muttered. Bodies started to move, to turn in his direction. Maddox lowered his head a little, avoiding all eye contact as the man ahead turned around.
“What’s that, Blackjaw?” It was Indriga, a solid two metres of tattooed muscle and knife scars. He’d been stuck on R Sector for killing and eating some poor hab-wife.
“Nothing. Nothing, Indriga.”
“Damn right, nothing. Now shut your mouth before we all throw up.”
He kept his head down, doing his best not to smile. He couldn’t help it, though. He kept seeing Laffian howling and thrashing around with no leg… And the trembling smile became a blurted cough of a snigger. A droplet of warm, thick saliva plopped onto the stock of his stolen shotgun. Laffian’s gun. He laughed again.
The men around him turned away, swearing. He likely would have died then and there had the lift not ground to a halt and the doors opened. The thin, ash-tasting air floated in to meet them as the prisoners looked out onto the landing platform.
“There it is,” Indriga said, already walking out.
It was a ship—a small vessel by troopship standards, and that was about the only frame of reference Maddox had; he’d been Imperial Guard before his arrest for… whatever they’d said he’d done. He hadn’t done anything, and he knew it. No way. Not him. He was Guard, through and through. Damned if he could even remember what they’d insisted he’d done wrong, now…
Someone shoving him forward jolted his senses back to the present.
“Let’s take it,” one of them said.
It was vaguely hawkish, with downswept wings, and it was dark blue, like the colour of the deepest oceans. The thought of that made Maddox’s stomach quiver and bunch. He hated the sea. He couldn’t put his head below the surface without imagining something deep down there, looking back at him.
He was one of the stragglers, while most of his fellow prisoners ran forwards with thei
r stolen clubs and guns held high. Their saviours—the god-warriors in black—had chosen some of the strongest and fittest inmates in R Sector to come up here and perform this sacred duty. There were people in this ship, and they had to die. The gods had spoken.
And, hell yes, one of them was supposed to be a woman.
It was good to be free. It was good to be the chosen champion of the gods that had bestowed upon him the freedom he so richly deserved. Even the awful air tasted better than usual.
These were the thoughts swirling around Jerl “Blackjaw” Maddox’s mind as he died. When he went down, he was still too lost in his thoughts of freedom to really comprehend what was happening to him, and he died with his body in pieces, still smiling, and still smelling terrible as he laughed without any sound leaving his lips.
The turret cannons on the gunship blazed away, bolt rounds streaming out to thump home into yielding flesh only to detonate a moment after impact. Inmates were reduced to shattered husks of meat and bone, thrown across the landing platform in ugly smears. From the vox speakers mounted on the Thunderhawk’s exterior, a voice spoke calmly in heavily-accented Gothic.
“Welcome, all of you,” Septimus said. “Please enjoy the last mistake you’ll ever make.”
Cyrion checked his bolter again, then clamped it once more to his thigh armour.
“Stop that,” voxed Malek. “You look irritated.”
“I can’t think why,” Cyrion sneered.
First Claw and their Atramentar escorts sat in the restraint thrones of a Black Legion gunship, their surroundings vibrating as the Thunderhawk juddered through the atmosphere.
“Will they take Blackened?” Cyrion asked. “It would be a foolish error if they tried.”
“They just wanted Talos,” Xarl said. He clicked the blinking rune that confirmed a private channel with Cyrion. “And the Atramentar knew it would happen. They were here to ensure we did not step out of line, and backed down at the first need to shed blood. The Exalted planned this.”
Cyrion’s voice was tired. The weight of the prisoners’ fears, although faded now, still rested heavily on his mind. “I grow weary of this, Xarl.”
“Of what?”
“The treachery. The death of trust. Of my mind aching from the silent weeping terror of mortals.”
Xarl said nothing at first. Sympathy was not in his blood. “You are tainted, Cyrion,” he said at last.
“Something like that,” Cyrion replied. He took a breath. “The Exalted has always resented Talos’ position in the Legion, as a favoured son of our father, but this was a step too far. To attempt to kill him? Is Vandred insane?”
Xarl’s response came after a bitter laugh. “What makes you so sure he wanted Talos dead? Out of the way, certainly. Perhaps among the ranks of the Black Legion. A gain for both Abaddon and the Exalted.”
“Like Ruven,” Cyrion said.
“Yes, brother,” Xarl said, his voice lower now. “Like Ruven.”
Eurydice swore with feeling as the Thunderhawk shook again.
“Throne, I don’t want to die here.”
Septimus didn’t turn to look at her. His focus was entirely on the ammunition readouts, which were dropping with heart-wrenching speed. He clicked the vox live.
“This is the VIII Legion Thunderhawk Blackened.”
“It’s not working,” Eurydice swallowed her panic at his desperate attempts. “The Covenant can’t hear you. Talos can’t hear you.”
“Shut up,” he replied. “This is the VIII Legion Thunderhawk Blackened, hailing the battle-barge Hunter’s Premonition. Do you read?”
“The… the what?”
“Another one of our ships is in orbit,” he said. “One of the Night Lords’ flagships.”
“Why aren’t you shooting?”
He didn’t even need to glance at the ammo displays. “Because every gun that can track a target this close to the hull is out of shells.”
The cockpit shook again, this time hard enough to throw Eurydice back onto her chair. “Throne!” she shouted. Septimus winced. “That wasn’t good. They’re inside.”
“What?”
He didn’t answer her. “This is the VIII Legion Thunderhawk Blackened, hailing the battle-barge Hunter’s Premonition. Please respond.”
Voices could be heard yelling in the deck below. The prisoners that had survived the annihilation offered by the heavy bolters were definitely inside now.
“Damn it.” Septimus abandoned the console and pulled the curved hacking blade that was strapped to his calf. “Worth a try.”
Eurydice tossed him one of the pistols.
“Looks like I won’t be guiding your heretic masters through the Sea of Souls after all.” She smiled a nasty little grin, somewhere between bitterness, terror and triumph.
Septimus raised his pistol at the closed cockpit door. “We’ll see.”
IX
FOUR GODS
“Our brothers run to the edges of the Imperium to cower in the shadows of the Dark Gods that protect them. Only we, the Night Lords, the sons of Konrad Curze, are strong enough to stand alone. We will bring our wrath upon the empire that betrayed us, and though the ages may see us divided and broken by the endless war ahead, we will stand untainted until the stars themselves die!”
—The war-sage Malcharion
Epilogue of his work, The Tenebrous Path
Talos opened his eyes to nothingness.
To one who saw through pitch darkness as naturally as a mortal man saw in daylight, this was both unwelcome and unfamiliar. He turned, still seeing nothing, unsure if this was because there was nothing to see in the blackness or if he had lost his sight. It occurred to him with no small amusement that he’d inflicted this very fate on so many mortals over the years, forcing them to awaken in the darkness of the Covenant’s interior. A cautious smile spread across his lips as he enjoyed the irony.
The air was cold on his flesh.
Flesh? At the first hints of the sensation, he could see himself now—his hands before his face, bone-white and blue-veined, and his tunic of dark weave. He was out of his battle plate. How could this be? Had his wound been so terrible that First Claw had cut him from his armour and…
Wait. His wound.
His pale hands pulled open the front of his robe, baring his chest to the darkness. His torso, a pale, sculpted echo of ancient Romanii marble statues of their warlike gods, was unbroken by any wound. Across his sternum were the junction plugs and connection sockets required to link into the powered systems of his armour, and he could make out the hard shell of the black carapace implanted beneath his skin, forming the sub-dermal armour that sheathed his form in additional protection and allowed him to interface with his battle plate’s senses.
But no wound.
“Talos,” a voice spoke from the blackness. He turned to meet it, hands reaching for weapons that didn’t exist here, wherever here was.
The speaker was a Night Lord. Talos recognised the armour instantly, for it was his own.
In the nothingness, he faced himself, staring at his armoured image with something approaching fury.
“What madness is this?”
“A test,” his reflection said, removing its helm. The face beneath the helmet was, and was not, his own visage. Eyes of silver stared back at him, and the centre of his forehead was branded with a stylised rune of sickening devotion. The burn mark was still fresh, still trickling blood down his reflection’s face.
“You are not me,” Talos said. “I would never wear the slave mark of the Ruinous Powers.”
“I am what you might be,” his image smiled, revealing teeth as silver as his eyes. “If you were bold enough to unlock your potential.”
And if you will not hear this offer from me, you will hear it from my allies. The Warmaster’s words came back to him now, trickling into his consciousness as the blood trickled into his reflection’s alien eyes.
“You are not one of the Ruinous Powers,” he said to the image before him.
“You are not a god.”
“Am I not?” it replied, smiling indulgently.
“No god would be so brazen, so unsubtle. You would turn your eyes upon one soul? Never.”
“I turn my eyes to a trillion souls with each passing moment. It is the nature of a god to exist in such a way.”
An ugly thought clawed its way up from Talos’ doubts to reach his lips. “Am I dead?”
“No,” the god smiled again, “though you are wounded in the world of flesh.”
“Then this is the warp? You have taken my spirit from my body.”
“Be silent. The others come.”
He was right. Other figures manifested about him—one behind, one to the left, one to the right, taking the cardinal points around where he stood in the darkness. He couldn’t focus upon them. Each time he turned, he saw nothing except the others existing at the edges of his vision.
“This,” said the first figure, “is what I offer you.” He reached out a gauntleted hand to Talos. “You are keen of mind and great of vision. You know your armies of god-sons will fail without true gods to lead them. Your flesh gods have fallen. Your fathers are slain. You are godless, and in godlessness lies defeat.”
“Touch me and die,” the Astartes warned. “Mark my words, false god. If you touch me, you will die.”
“I am Slaa Neth. I am the One Who Thirsts. I am a god, more than your gene-father ever was. And this,” the figure repeated, “is what I offer you.”
Talos…
…opened his eyes to a battlefield.
A battlefield he claimed, heart and soul. The enemy, the Imperial army, was reduced to a graveyard of wrecked tanks and corpses that reached from horizon to horizon.
He stood above his warriors as they kneeled before him, feeling the pleasant sting of some vicious new battle chemical stimulant flooding his veins. He was wounded, for there were cracks in his swollen armour where reddish ichor flowed down his war-plate. These wounds, great rents and rips in his flesh open to the chill air of the battlefield, ached with a pleasure so intense he cried his thanks to the stars above.
[Night Lords 01] - Soul Hunter Page 15
