Something was wrong. He could hear it in their voices.
He slowed in his stride, falling behind the rest of his claw, his attention pouring into the myriad cries and conflicting reports coming over the vox. A pattern emerged soon enough.
Captain Sahaal had reclaimed one of the Night Haunter’s relics… and immediately fled. He was taking Umbrea Insidior away from the fleet, breaking formation and trying to run from the eldar.
He has abandoned 1st Company. Talos swallowed. Had he heard that right? Had one of the Legion’s most respected commanders left his own warriors to die at the hands of the eldar?
Talos stopped dead in his tracks, the corridor silent now that the rest of his squad had raced so far ahead.
Sahaal had fled with his treasure, running into the void. 1st Company were battling their way to their boarding pods, and would be stranded, forced to die fighting or rely on the charity of the other vessels to save them.
Talos cared little for most of this. The straggles of 1st Company were 1st Company’s own trouble. The Legion was in retreat from this grotesque ambush, and 10th Company would be fighting to save itself.
But M’Shen’s death had still not been confirmed over the vox-network.
In his greed, Sahaal was fleeing with his trinket, all thoughts of vengeance forgotten… and the assassin was still alive.
Talos turned from his path of escape, and moved deeper into the ship.
The power was out, leaving her in darkness, but she was safe at last.
As quickly as they’d come, the Astartes had fled.
Her ship still shuddered, but it seemed to her that the alien attackers, the filthy xenos creatures that named themselves eldar, had withdrawn with the Night Lords’ retreat.
One of them had taken her hand with a swing of his blade. She could not fight off five of them at once, and the blow had severed her wrist in a clean slice. Her training made any pain from the wound utterly ignorable, but M’Shen bound her wrist with a tourniquet and a temporary seal of synthetic flesh nevertheless. The bleeding had been a danger, even if shock and pain had not.
She stood on the bloody rain of her bridge, listening to the laboured breathing and shivers of the few crew members that yet drew breath.
None of them could see. The auxiliary power should have come online by now, resurrecting the lights. The continuing darkness was a bold enough statement that her ship was almost certainly damaged beyond easy repair.
M’Shen spun on her toes, her blade in her remaining hand. She could see nothing in the pure blackness, but she didn’t need to. The thrum of live power armour filled her senses. The low growls of its servo-joints and false muscle fibres flexing told her all she needed to know. The Astartes’ location, his posture, everything.
The assassin edged to the right, allowing herself a smile. Despite her exhaustion and blood loss, a lone Astartes would prove no threat. She—
Talos closed his hand around her throat.
He could sense she was duller, slower, and the beat of her heart was quicker than it had been in the palace. The assassin was weakened from her escape and the recent battle.
But she would kill him before his hearts had time to beat twice if he tried to hold her. Everything about this creature was engineered to end life, and with infinitely more skill and grace than the blunt efficiency of the Astartes. He was a warrior, but she was a murderer. He was trained for battle and war. She was bred only to kill.
The same second his hand gripped her throat, he was already acting.
Not to squeeze. Her armour of precious synskin would resist such trauma. He jerked her close, risking a headbutt to daze her. That was a mistake. The assassin leaned her head back like a recoiling serpent. Curse her, she was fast.
Talos felt her fisted hand coming up to unleash the lethality within her rings—each one a digital weapon of some unknown configuration. He wasted no time.
The Night Lord spat into her face, and hurled her away.
She had not screamed in many years.
It wasn’t that pain was new to her, nor even a surprise, but this was no neat severance of limb from the body—this was the dissolving of her eyes in her skull, and never before had pain eclipsed her senses so completely. Even through the agony, she imagined the wretched Night Lord stumbling away in his cumbersome armour, amused at her momentary helplessness.
And she was right. In the darkness, Talos relished the sound of her scream. Even sweeter was the subtle, mellifluous hiss of acidic venom eating into the soft tissue of her beautiful blue eyes.
Panting now, seeing nothing but milky white sunfire, the assassin swallowed the pain, remembered her teachings, and used the agony as a focus. Over the vicious tssssssshhhhh of her melting eyes, she heard the humming rambles of his armour.
He had to die. He had to die now.
She launched at him to make the need become reality.
Talos fired at the floor, bolt shells masking his movements as their rapid explosions overwhelmed the bridge chamber with noise. He cast a black-eyed glance at the assassin blindly fighting the air, her lashing kicks and blade sweeps utterly lethal—aimed at audible joints and weak points of his armour—but utterly useless. Talos was already across the bridge away from her, bolter still barking.
Deafened and disoriented, the assassin slowed her movements. Desperately poised, muscles taut, she seemed to be trying to filter the noise of his armour through the banging detonations.
He risked another shot to distract her, aiming squarely in her direction. She weaved a minimal amount, just as she had in the palace, and the bolt went wide.
Talos breathed out a curse as however she sought to sense him succeeded perfectly. The assassin turned to face him, and started running.
With his free hand, he slammed on his helm.
The Night Lord was a fool.
Every explosion ringing from the floor betrayed the shell’s point of origin. It was complex, a matter of rigid concentration and training, and M’Shen was slowed by the pain she struggled to overcome. That was why triangulating his location took almost four entire seconds—an age to her preternatural senses.
Bolts started tearing directly at her, which confirmed her belief that the Astartes was a fool. Even rendered sightless, these she dodged with ease.
A new sound overrode the slicing whoosh of missing bolts. A sound she had only heard once before. His voice, speaking a single word.
“Preysight.”
Had her blows landed, he would have died. He knew this with cold certainty.
Assassins, those from the Imperial-sanctioned temples, were already legends in the young Imperium. Her remaining hand would have thrust, blade-like and steel-hard, into the joints of his armour, crushing nerves and perhaps even breaking the enhanced bone of an Astartes warrior’s skeleton. From there, his death would have taken mere moments. The pain he’d inflicted would be repaid tenfold.
None of her blows landed, because she made no attempt to strike him. As the blur of dull thermal movement came charging towards him, as every bolt he fired was dodged with ease, Talos filled his three lungs with the blood-rich air of her wrecked bridge.
As deep and echoing as the first thunderclap of a breaking storm, he roared his hatred at her.
Within a Callidus assassin, training and instinct met in honed, focused fusion. That fusion split within M’Shen as she lost the second of her senses. The depriving assault hit as hard and fast as the first. A moment of ear-splitting pain lanced through to the core of her mind, shaking her hearing, and all was suddenly silent.
She had no idea if the Night Lord was still screaming or had fallen quiet after detecting his triumph. Her senses were killed. She felt only the air shaking around her as her enemy moved again, and as bolts slashed past.
Blinded, deafened, clutching a shimmering blade that had taken the head of a fallen god, she twisted in her sprint and leapt at where she was certain the Astartes must be.
Her estimation was, as always, perfect.
“My father told me of this night,” he whispered to her. “And I never believed him. I never believed I would disobey him, until you came into our home and took him from us.”
M’Shen never heard his words. She would never hear anything again in her life, which was now measured in seconds. The assassin dropped her blade. As her gloved fingers uncurled almost against her will, she felt the heavy weapon thump against her foot.
Strengthless arms wouldn’t move. Trembling fingers couldn’t crook to fire digital weapons within the ornate rings. Painkillers choked her veins with no effect beyond an irritating tickle of sensation. Her stomach was aflame. It hurt even more than the hissing holes where her eyes had been. Some violation, some iron-hard presence pressed her in place, transfixing her torso.
She guessed correctly what it was. The Night Lord’s chainsword. He had impaled her on his blade.
A dim, fading part of her mind tried to assess this damage, but the brutal and human edge to her consciousness overrode a life of combat narcotics and relentless training. She was dying. She would be dead within moments.
“Godslayer,” she said to him, never hearing her own words. “That… is how I will… be remembered.”
Talos blinked stinging tears from his eyes. His thumb edged closer to the chainsword’s activation rune.
Threat, threat, threat the warning runes flickered. Talos blink-clicked them away, clearing his red visor display of all but the assassin’s masked face and her hollow, bleeding eye sockets.
“Ave Dominus Nox,” he whispered, and gunned the impaling chainsword into life.
He drifted for sixteen hours, alone in one of the boarding pods left by the ravaged survivors of 1st Company. In the absolute silence, he had only his grief and satisfaction to pass the time. They did so admirably.
When his brothers found him, when the pod was brought aboard the Covenant of Blood as it returned to seek survivors and salvage, Talos was still sitting in one of the pod’s thrones, his armour spotted with dried blood.
The pod’s doors opened into ramps, and Talos looked out into the Covenant’s starboard launch bay.
First Claw stood watching him, their weapons raised.
“She’s dead,” he told them, and rose to his feet, movements sluggish and weary.
His chainsword’s teeth were clogged with dark, chewed meat and shards of bone. Before leaving her vessel, he had sawn her into nothing more than gobbets of biological matter, venting his final frustrations on her remains. In the darkness of the bridge, the surviving mortal crew members heard everything, with only their fearful imaginations to provide the imagery.
“Talos…” Captain Malcharion, the war-sage, approached slowly. “Brother…”
Talos raised his head with equal slowness.
“She killed our father,” he said in a crackle of vox.
“I know, brother. We all know. Come, we must… deal with the aftermath.”
“The Haunter said I would do this,” Talos looked at the gore-caked blade. “I did not believe him. Not until I felt the rage of her presence in our palace.”
“It is over,” said Malcharion. “Come, Talos.”
“It will never be over.” Talos dropped the blade to the ground with a crash. “But at least now I know why he named me as he did. ‘One soul’ he said. ‘You will hunt one shining soul while all others turn their backs on vengeance.’”
“Brother, come…”
“If you touch me, Malcharion, I will kill you next. Leave me. I am going to my chambers. I need to… to think.” Talos left his weapons where they lay. Primus would gather them.
“As you wish,” the war-sage said, “Soul Hunter.”
“Soul Hunter,” Talos chuckled in response, the sound laced with bitterness. “I believe I could get used to that.”
XVIII
BROTHERHOOD
The interlocking cavern network beneath the Omnissiah’s Claw mountain range was home to miracles of immense scale and ingenuity. Here lay the living core of the Legio Maledictis, and the sacred heart of the Adeptus Mechanicus’ operations on Crythe Prime.
A million humans, one million souls in varying states of augmentation, worked in these hallowed underground tunnels. The air was fever-hot with smoke, shimmering with heat blur, and rancid with the metallic reek of incense and industry.
Entire cave systems were given over to railroaded conveyor carriages, huge trains transporting resources, ammunition, servitors and machine parts from one colossal chamber to the other. The myriad chambers themselves reached hundreds of metres in height, each capable of housing a battle-ready Warlord-class Titan. The stone skin of this great lair was masked in machinework attached to the walls: consoles, sensor relays, gantries, elevators, storage loaders, promethium fuel tanks, and grand icons of the Mechanicus of Mars. Little remained of the original red stone that had once reached as far as—and indeed farther than—the mortal eye could see.
A city of factories and forges hidden beneath the armoured skin of the world’s crust. A city founded to provide the Imperium of Man with invaluable god-machines to stride across distant battlefields in the crusades of a dying empire. A city that had prospered for almost two thousand years.
The plains before the mountain range had fallen to the Warmaster after the previous day’s fighting. The Mechanicus’ last-breath attempt to deter the siege of Seventeen-Seventeen’s front gates had failed, and the evidence of that failure stretched from horizon to horizon. Troop bulk landers and Astartes Thunderhawks earned soldiers and warriors down from the void and from elsewhere on Crythe, massing on the plains in one unified horde. The bodies of slain skitarii and mortal fodder smothered the rest of the plain, punctuated by the occasional corpse of a downed Titan. The mortal dead bloated in the morning sun. The skitarii’s flesh-parts were already starting to stink and discolour. The fallen Titans crawled with ants—the Warmaster’s own tech-adepts recovering the slain god-machines for use on other worlds.
Crythe Prime was well-chosen by the Warmaster not only for its resources, but because the majority of its Titan Legion was engaged in battle elsewhere in the segmentum. Not only could resources be harvested from Seventeen-Seventeen if it fell, but the Imperium would be denied yet another bastion of strength in the future.
The great gates would not hold for long. Seventeen-Seventeen had grown too far beyond its original plans. The Avenue of Triumph leading into the main under-city now stood outside the protection of Site 017-017’s invincible void shields. The main gate was naught but adamantium and Mechanicus ingenuity; despite its strength, it would fall to massed fire within hours. Wide enough to allow three Titans marching out abreast, it was also wide enough to allow the Warmaster’s army within.
Under siege, threatened with destruction, the hidden city called upon its chosen sons. The few that remained answered this call. They marched through their home caverns, immense shoulders bristling with city-crushing weaponry, beneath banners of a hundred past glories. At their heels, a million adepts, servitors and skitarii warriors braced to repel the invaders.
The last sons of the Legio Maledictis had awoken, and Seventeen-Seventeen shook with their tread.
Blackened stood ready on the deck. It was a howling, dark-armoured vulture, with its engines whining as they gushed heat-shimmer into the air. It breathed readiness, and the Astartes felt inspired just seeing it.
First Claw marched in loose formation towards the lowered gang ramp, their armour as repaired as the handful of hours back on board the Covenant had allowed. Each suit of war-plate still bore a wealth of scars. Mercutian and Uzas, with no access to trained artificers, looked as though they had no right to walk away from the last battlefield. Pits, cracks, chips and cuts spoiled the surfaces of their ceramite plating.
Mercutian had complained of his armour’s machine-spirit responding sluggishly. Small wonder, with the damage its skin had taken.
As he marched, he cycled through sight modes
, swearing softly over the vox.
“My preysight is down.” The words came out hesitantly, and for good reason.
“Bad omen,” Uzas chuckled. “Bad, bad omen.”
“I do not hold any faith in omens,” Adhemar said.
“Strange then,” Uzas replied, “that you serve in a squad led by a prophet.”
“Uzas,” Talos said, turning to face him.
“What?”
Talos said nothing. He didn’t move.
“What?” Uzas repeated. “No lecture?”
Talos still said nothing, standing unmoving.
“His life signs are… insane,” Cyrion was watching his retinal displays. “Oh, hell. Xarl!”
Talos half-turned, staggered, and fell on nerveless legs. Xarl caught him with a clash of battle armour.
“What ails him?” Mercutian asked.
“Seven eyes open without warning,” said Talos over the vox, “and the sons of the Angel fly with vengeance in their hearts.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Cyrion said to Mercutian. “Septimus! You are needed here.”
“The Angel’s sons seek the blade of gold, and justice for their brothers with blackened souls…”
“Now, Septimus!” Cyrion yelled.
The Exalted turned its horned head to a mortal whose name he had never even tried to learn. “Launch status,” he drawled.
The officer straightened his outdated uniform as he checked his console displays. “Lord Malcharion’s pod reads as already down, master. All squads already engaged or en route to the surface… except First Claw.”
The Exalted craned itself forward. Bone creaked and armour growled. “What?”
“Confirming, master.” The officer affixed his vox-mic to his collar. “This is the command deck. Report launch status, First Claw.”
The Exalted, ever a student of fear in the human form, watched in perverse fascination as the officer’s face paled. The soft drumming of the mortal’s heart thumped a touch harder and faster. Bad news, then. News the mortal feared to share.
[Night Lords 01] - Soul Hunter Page 29
