[Night Lords 01] - Soul Hunter

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

  “Then why does he trust them?”

  Irritation—and doubt, Talos realised with a jolt of unease—had crept into Malcharion’s vox-tone. He was a warrior from an age when almost no psychic tolerance pervaded the Legions. Such abominations were either barred from loyal service or strictly trained and regulated, not relied upon as part of a war’s planning.

  “He works with what he has. In this case, astropaths across the fleet confirm it.”

  “Does Krastian agree?”

  “Krastian is dead, sir. Slain sixty years ago. We have not had an astropath on board since.”

  “For the best, perhaps. Psykers. They are deviants and not to be trusted.”

  “The astropaths aboard Hunter’s Premonition align their predictions with the Warmaster’s own. The relief fleet is still weeks away.”

  “Hnnh.”

  “How was your first battle, sir?”

  Malcharion had already answered this question several times. Upon his own return to the Covenant, visitors from several squads came to pay their respects and speak about the surface conflict.

  “Glorious, brother. The splash of blood against my armour… The exaltation of ending a legion of lives with cannon and fist… It will be a great triumph when we take this world in our father’s name.”

  Talos smiled. Barely.

  “Now tell me the truth.”

  The servitors attending Malcharion paused momentarily as the Dreadnought made a gear-shifting grind of a sound.

  “Joyless. Passionless. Lifeless.”

  “Are you are angry at me for waking you?”

  “Were I angry, brother, you would already be dead. I would erase you from my sight the way I annihilated that Atramentar bastard Vraal. I never liked him.”

  “No one did.”

  “I do not understand what is needed of me. That is all.”

  Talos considered this for a moment. “Do you realise how you sound to me, sir? To all of us? How your voice hangs in the air like the echo of thunder, and stampedes across the vox?”

  “I am not obtuse, boy. I am not blind to this form’s inspirational qualities. But I am dead, Talos. That is the truth, and it will tell in the end.”

  “Tonight was a fine victory. Not a life lost. We make planetfall again in three hours. Dawn will see the mountain fortress-foundry breached.”

  “And I will pretend to care, brother. Have no fear.”

  “I heard how you rallied Ninth and Tenth Claws on the field of battle.”

  “All I did was kill for hours and bellow at the enemy.” Another grinding sound clunked from the depths of the Dreadnought.

  “What was that?”

  “My auto-loader cycling,” Malcharion lied. It had been how his behemoth body translated a chuckle. “Now dispense with the formalities, Soul Hunter.”

  “I could live without you calling me that, sir.”

  “And you think I am inclined to agree with your desires? I am Malcharion the Reborn, and you are an Apothecary with delusions of command.”

  “Point made,” Talos smiled.

  “Enough foolishness. Why are you here? What troubles you?”

  “I lost my bolter.”

  “Hnnh. Have mine.”

  “‘Have mine’?” Talos laughed. “With such great reverence you treat Legion relics.”

  “I certainly don’t need it anymore.” The war machine raised and lowered its twin-barrelled autocannon. Two servitors working on the barrels emitted error sounds from throat-voxes as their work was interrupted.

  “Sorry…” the Dreadnought boomed in its true voice. Deltrian bowed, reaper-like and sinuous. “All is well, lord.”

  “Fine,” Malcharion spoke into the vox again. “Get on with it, Talos.”

  “I had a vision, sir.”

  “This is hardly remarkable to me.”

  “This one was different. It is… wrong. Some of it, at least. It’s not coming true. Right from the first moment I woke from it, everything within the images felt unlikely. It felt like a lie uncoiling inside my mind. Uzas of First Claw, killing Cyrion. And now, as the planet stands on the very precipice of being conquered, I wonder at the rest of the vision. Faroven has not died, as I dreamed he would.”

  “Are you so certain these events must take place on Crythe?”

  “I was,” Talos admitted. “Now I am unsure they will take place at all. I look at so many of our brothers—even Cyrion and Uzas. I fear their taint has spread to me. Could my second sight be corrupted by exposure to the Ruinous Powers?”

  “How many visions have you suffered? Are they as frequent as they were before my entombment?”

  “More than before. They grow more frequent.”

  “Hnnh. Maybe he will die on Crythe. Maybe he will die later. Maybe he will not die in the manner you have foreseen, and you worry over nothing. I don’t recall you whining this much in the past.”

  “Whining? Sir…”

  “Even the primarch’s visions were nebulous at times. Vague, he would say. Clouded. What right do you have to claim infallibility when even our gene-father’s second sight was imperfect?”

  “Wait. Wait.” Talos stared up the giant machine, his vision coloured killing-red. The image of Malcharion in life, clutching those three helms, stared back at him.

  “Our father’s dreams,” Talos whispered, “were sometimes wrong?”

  “The virtue of such dreams is sometimes in the symbolism.”

  “This… cannot be true.”

  “No? This is why you always bred enemies within our ranks, brother. A Legion is a hive of one million secrets. You, Soul Hunter, have always assumed you knew everything. I always liked that about you. Liked your confidence. Not everyone felt the same.”

  “Did the gene-sire ever speak of me?”

  “Only to tell me why you were named as you were. I laughed. I thought our father joked at my expense. It seemed so unlikely that anyone would disobey his final order.” Malcharion made the strange gear-changing growl again.

  “Least of all you.”

  XVII

  SOUL HUNTER

  “Because the name suits you.

  One soul, my son.

  One hunt, in the name of revenge.

  You will hunt one shining soul when all others turn their backs on vengeance.”

  —The Primarch Konrad Curze

  Addressing Apothecary Talos of First Claw, 10th Company

  Talos had called to her from the darkness. He’d called the assassin’s name, spoken in a whisper that emerged as a crackle of vox. “M’Shen,” he hissed.

  The assassin broke into a run. Talos followed.

  The others would follow later. When the shock broke, when their tawdry and infantile ambitions overcame their grief. When they would look at the body of their slain father and weep not for his death, but for the fact his relics were taken from their greedy grasp.

  Talos cared for none of this. The Imperial bitch had murdered his father, and she was going to die for it.

  This was the age before Aurum. In his gauntlet he gripped a chainsword, gearing it into howling life as he pursued her. Although bareheaded, his vox-bead was in place. The shouts of his brothers transmitted with punishing clarity.

  “Does he hunt her?”

  “Brother, do not do this!”

  “You defy the father’s last wishes!”

  Talos let them rant and rage. The hunter had no concern for anything beyond his prey. Bolts streaked past her as he fired and she dodged in blurs of dark lightning. Each bang was a storm’s echo within the black halls of the Night Haunter’s palace on Tsagualsa.

  The assassin dared a laugh. And well she might. What was a lone Astartes to a trained agent of the Imperial Callidus Temple? Nothing. Less than nothing. She ducked and weaved and flipped over the bolts.

  Outpaced with ease, Talos cursed as he slowed to a halt, and melted back into the shadows.

  The hunt was not over.

  M’Shen licked her lips to moisten them. The air of Tsagua
lsa was bitter and dry, an effect only magnified by the stilted air within this palace of the damned. Her fingers curled in the hair of her slain prey, the head of the Traitor Primarch clutched hard in her grip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

  She was painting the onyx floor with trickles of blood from the severed neck. The blood’s scent was cloying and too rich, like powerful spices. This was the holy blood of the Emperor, soured into rancidity by corruption and evil. M’Shen resisted the urge to cast the grisly trophy away. Evidence. She needed evidence the deed was done.

  It was strange. The primarch’s genetic inhumanity was revealed once more even in death—the severed head had taken several minutes to start bleeding. Clotting agents within the blood were finally breaking down, releasing this dark trickle.

  She could have simply taken the artifacts he wore, such as his simple crown circlet, the silver blade sheathed on his back, or the cloak of black feathers draped across his shoulders. But these relics, while valuable, could be stolen from the living as well as the dead. She needed overwhelming evidence to cast before her superiors. In the form of the dead god’s head, the assassin had all she would require on that score.

  The artifacts she’d taken were for her personal honour, not just the honour of her temple. And oh, how they would praise her for this.

  M’Shen’s pict-link back to her ship’s data recorders, while scarcely reliable over such a distance, was gone now. She’d felt it die as she leapt at the Night Haunter and that, too, reeked of the most poetic corruption. The timing of such severance… Something about this place…

  It made no sense. Her memory was as close to eidetic as the human mind allowed—yet still, she was lost. These black and bone-lined corridors, how they shifted and weaved. Sound earned strangely here. Sometimes it earned not at all.

  The wall next to her head exploded in a shower of debris. She was already moving, already leaping to the side and falling back into her sprint with infinite grace. She was Callidus. She was the most murderous art rendered into human form.

  On and on she ran. Constantly she passed Astartes in their outdated mark III and newer mark IV war-plate. At the sight of her, these warriors would freeze. Some trembled with the suppressed urge to draw weapons and meet her in combat. She felt their blood-thirst as an overwhelming presence in the air. A few, a rare few, shouted curses at her as she fled past. But not many. These were the stoic sons of a most moribund father.

  And their gene-sire had died willingly. Still this most astonishing of developments assailed her thoughts. Fully half of the Callidus Temple, beloved instrument of the God-Emperor, hunted across the galaxy’s Eastern Fringe for the lifeblood of Konrad Curze, Eighth Primarch, father of the Night Lords Legion.

  Here, on barren Tsagualsa, within this palatial fortress of onyx and obsidian, of ivory and bone and banners of flayed flesh she had found him.

  Willingly, he surrendered his life.

  She, M’Shen, was the death of a primarch. Godslayer, her mistresses would name her…

  Tremendous weight smashed her to the ground. The primarch’s head rolled from her clutch, her own face smashed against the tiled floor. Stimulants flooded her blood and she hurled the burden away. Within a heartbeat’s span, the assassin was on her feet once more, looking back at the Astartes she’d thrown back against the wall.

  Him. Again.

  Talos’ own blood burned. His armour squirted fast spurts of searing chemicals into his body, through sockets in his spine, his neck, his chest and wrists. His chainblade shrieked in a series of enraged whines as it cut nothing but air. The assassin weaved aside from each blow, seeming barely to move, her body slipping into the minimal amount of movement necessary to dodge each swing.

  The assassin’s blue eyes, the blue of seas long boiled away on Terra, regarded him with fading amusement. She had nothing to say to him, and no reason to fear him, Astartes or otherwise. She was an Imperial assassin. She was the limit of human perf—

  Talos’ blade edge nicked her black weave armour, slashing a cut in the synskin over her bicep.

  Eyes wide in alarm, she made a diving roll to the side, grabbed the trailing black hair of the primarch’s head, and sprinted away faster than any Astartes could hope to follow.

  Talos watched her go. The voices of his brothers were heated in his ear. Even his brothers within First Claw railed at him for this most disrespectful of disobediences.

  “The Haunter chose this fate!” Vandred screamed.

  “Talos, this was his final wish!” Cyrion implored him. “She must escape back to Terra!”

  Talos moved back into the shadows, a crooked smile on his face.

  His vox-link screamed in a hundred tinny voices, others now joining the raging arguments.

  The sons of Night Haunter had recovered their desperate ambitions quickly enough. Acerbus, Halasker, Sahaal and the others—the other captains, the other Chosen. Talos heard them whining and raging in his ears, and he found himself smiling at their furious and helpless disbelief.

  “She has taken his signet ring,” one stormed.

  “His crown!” another wailed like a lost child.

  “Our father had not foreseen this,” one of them said. And then the ultimate hypocrisy—they demanded the entire Legion do now for greed what they had been cursing Talos for attempting in the name of vengeance.

  “She must be slain for this!” they cried.

  “She has transgressed against us all!”

  The names of Legion relics stolen from their rightful inheritors was a litany Talos had no desire to listen to. He tuned out their voices, so suddenly full of righteous indignation.

  How soon his brethren turned from faith and love in their gene-sire to grave doubts—the very same moment they realised the assassin had stolen weapons and relics they believed were theirs to inherit.

  Such greed. Such pathetic, disgusting greed.

  Talos despised them all in that moment. Never before had the sickening ambition of his corruptible brothers been shown so clearly.

  And so was born the hatred that would never heal.

  The assassin escaped the palace, and did so with apparent ease.

  The Night Lords took their ships, ragtag gatherings of claws and companies, racing to their Thunderhawks to return to their vessels in orbit. The entire Night Lord fleet ringed the world of Tsagualsa, and they gave chase in unprecedented force.

  Four vessels pulled ahead of the others. These were Hunter’s Premonition of 3rd and 11th Companies; Umbrea Insidior of 1st Company; The Silent Prince of 4th and 7th Companies, and Covenant of Blood, of 10th.

  The assassin’s ship, no matter how sleek, fast and exquisitely-wrought it was, stood no chance at all. As it powered away from the dark orb of Tsagualsa, the pursuing cruisers lanced in its wake, weapons roaring at their quarry’s essential systems.

  She fell from the warp, powerless and crippled, dead in space. Boarding pods spat from all four Astartes vessels, crashing home and locking fast in the metal flesh of the Imperial ship.

  The hunters bit into their prey, each one desperate to be the first to taste blood, and with it, victory.

  On board the assassin’s ship, Talos ran with the other hunters in his pack. Menials, mortals, servitors—all fell before the howling Night Lords as they flooded the decks from a hundred hull breaches.

  It was to be a day forever imprinted in the annals of Legion history, as well as one held in the hearts of every Astartes present in that moment of denied vindication.

  As the hunters found her—squads from 1st Company claiming that honour—a fresh anger broke out across the vox-network.

  Talos stood in the charnel pit of the crew habitation quarters, surrounded by brothers from the 10th and the ruined meat of so many mortal crew members. Blood painted the walls, the floor and the dark fronts of their armour plating. Not a soul would survive the culling of the murderer’s ship.

  At first, the reports had difficulty filtering through to the Astartes engaged in the hunt on board. Their bloo
d was up, and the alerts were lost within the chaos of howling voices taking hold of the vox-channels.

  Talos was one of the first to hear. He powered down his chainsword, tilting his head as he listened carefully.

  How can this be?

  “We are under attack,” he voxed to the others in proximity, his voice cold, calm, but edged with the taint of disbelief.

  “We are under attack, by the eldar.”

  In the centuries to come, the warriors of the VIII Legion would argue over the exact nature of the xenos ambush. Priding from their unknowable pathways through the void, wraith-like eldar ships ghosted around the embattled Night Lords vessels, alien weapons bringing light to the blackness, cutting into yielding shields without mercy.

  Some claimed the assault was to claim the relics of the primarch, just as the assassin had. Others argued that an alien race would have no need of such treasures, and it was either indecipherable xenos reasoning—or merely a night of ill-fortune conspired by fate—that brought the fleets into contact at such a moment.

  Umbrea Insidior would be lost, and with it, the betrayer Sahaal. The Silent Prince would suffer devastating damage, but ultimately the xenos fleet would be annihilated.

  Yet few of the Legion claimed any satisfaction in the hollow triumph won that night.

  During the evacuation, eldar warriors materialised in the hallways of the assassin’s ship, manifesting before the packs of enraged Night Lords to be cut down even before they were free of the shimmering smears that marked the aftermath of alien teleportation technology.

  First Claw, along with the other squads on board, fought their way back to their boarding pods.

  “Whatever they’ve come for,” Cyrion voxed as he cut the head from an eldar female even as she appeared, “they want it badly.”

  “Back to the ship!” Captain Malcharion was shouting over the disorderly fighting retreat. “Back to the Covenant!”

  The vox was no clearer now. Jubilant cries clashed with the calls for withdrawal and hateful curses levelled at the aliens. Somewhere in the verbal melee, Talos could hear the victorious shrieks of Captain Sahaal, and the fevered raging of 1st Company.