[Night Lords 02] - Blood Reaver

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

  “Hold him.” Variel isn’t angry, he is never angry, but he is certainly displeased. “It is difficult enough with the convulsions, but we are risking severe brain damage now.”

  “Please, Corsair, just do what you can.”

  Mercutian. The rich man’s son, heir to the City’s Edge syndicate. So very polite. The prophet’s smile registers across his face as a peeling rictus grin, formed not from humour, but the tight sneer of tensing musculature.

  “He’s suffering cardiac dysrhythmia. In both hearts. Talos. Talos?”

  “He can’t hear you. He can never hear anyone when these things take hold.”

  “It is a wonder he survives these.” Variel stops speaking, and flashes of red pain jab into the prophet’s head, flashing scarlet before his sightless eyes. “I… need to… trigger his sus-an membrane, to stabilise the overworked core organs… Th…”

  …he was home.

  He was home, and knowing it was a dream did nothing to diminish the rush of chill comfort. A memory. This had all happened before.

  Not Nostramo, no. And not the Covenant. This was Tsagualsa, the refuge, their fortress on the fringe of space.

  The doors to the Screaming Gallery stood open, Atramentar guardians barring passage to all but the primarch’s chosen. They stood in defiant pride, not permitted to enter themselves, yet warding the doors against intrusion. The Legion’s Terminator elite walked with heads high these nights; their refusal to serve the new First Captain was a festering wound that accorded them a subtle rise in prestige. With Sevatar dead and a Terran appointed to his role, the former First Captain’s elite warriors splintered into hunting packs, binding themselves to company commanders they respected, rather than remain whole under a new master not of their home world.

  One of the Terminators was Malek, his helm untusked, his red eye lenses bright with targeting acquisitions. Talos saluted the two Atramentar before making his way into the antechamber.

  The walls, like so much of the Legion’s fortress, were formed from black stone sculpted into forms of torment. Twist-backed humans arched and writhed motionlessly, captured at moments of supreme agony, their wide eyes and screaming mouths shaped by sadistic devotion.

  Shaped. Not carved. Talos hesitated by the doors, his fingertips tracing over the open eyes of an infant girl reaching for the protective—worthless—embrace of an older man, perhaps her father. Who had she been, before the Legion raided her world? What had she done with her short life before she was dosed with paralytics and coated with rockrete? What dreams were quenched by her living entombment within the hardening walls of a primarch’s inner sanctum?

  Or did she know, on some panicked, animalistic strata of her dying mind, that in death she would be part of something more momentous than anything she’d achieved in life?

  Within the stone, she would be long dead. The mask staring out at the world immortalised her in the naive perfection of youth. No tracks of time across her face; no scars from battles against an empire that no longer deserved to stand.

  He withdrew his hand from her frozen face. The interior doors opened, bathing him in the warmth of the inner chamber.

  The Screaming Gallery was in fine voice tonight—an opera of bass moans, piercing cries and the ululating chime of sobbing beneath the other sounds of sorrow.

  Talos walked down the central pathway, boots thumping on the black stone, while the floor either side of the walkway rippled and tensed with the pliancy of human expression. Eyes, noses, teeth, and tongues poking from open mouths… The ground itself was a carpet of faces flesh-crafted together, kept alive by grotesque, baroque blood filters and organ simulator engines beneath the floor. As an Apothecary, Talos knew the machinery well: he was one of the few charged to maintain the foul ambience within the Screaming Gallery. Robed servitors mono-tasked for the duty sprayed gentle bursts of water vapour into the blinking eyes blanketing the floor, keeping them moist.

  Several of the primarch’s chosen were already gathered. Hellath, loyal beyond any other, preternaturally gifted with a blade, with the skull on his faceplate painted in streaky crimson; Sahaal, the Terran recently given First Captaincy—one of the few offworlders permitted here—the proud ice in his veins leaving him scorned by his brothers as often as heeded by them; Yash Kur, his fingers curling in twitch-spasms, breathing in a low rasp through his open mouth, the sound leaking from his helm’s vocabulator; Tyridal, skulls rattling against his war plate, as he dragged a whetstone along his gladius. His gauntlets were painted in sinners’ red—a marker of the Legion’s condemned: those warriors whose crimes against their own brothers meant they awaited execution at the primarch’s own hands. A death sentence rode above Tyridal’s head, to be exacted when Lord Curze decided his usefulness was at an end.

  Malcharion stood to the side, arms crossed over his chest. No rank existed within the Screaming Gallery. Talos greeted his captain with nothing more than a quiet acknowledgement, inaudible over the wails rising from the floor.

  When the primarch entered, it was with no flourish at all. Curze pushed open the double doors behind the Osseous Throne, his bare hands pale against the wrought iron. With no preamble, with no ritual greeting, the lord of the Legion took his throne.

  “So few of us?” he asked. Thin lips revealed a shark’s smile—the warlord’s serrated teeth all filed to arrowhead points. “Where is Jakr? And Fal Kata? Acerbus? Nadigrath?”

  Malcharion cleared his throat. “En route to the Anseladon Sector, lord.”

  Curze turned his cadaverous visage to the Tenth Captain. The dark eyes were enlivened by a curdling brightness, suggesting some deep sickness within.

  “Anseladon.” The primarch licked his corpse-lips. “Why?”

  “Because you ordered them there, my lord.”

  Curze seemed to muse on this, his gaze slackening, seeing through the walls of his palace. All the while, the floor’s wailing never ceased.

  “Yes,” he said. “Anseladon. The Ultramarine vanguard fleet.”

  “Aye, lord.”

  His hair had once been black, Nostraman black—the dark hair of those who grew without true light of the sun. Now its lustre was gone, and a frosting of grey patched close to his temples. The veins canalling below his white skin were bold enough to form a clear map of the subterranean biology at play beneath his face. Here was a fallen prince, gone to the grave, hollowed out by a hatred so strong he could not lie down and die.

  “I have thirty-one fleets of varying force at work within my father’s empire. I believe, at last, we have drawn enough of the Imperium’s ire that Terra has no choice but to act against us. But they will not lay siege to Tsagualsa. I will not allow it. Instead, I will ensure my father’s vengeance must assume a more elegant form.”

  As he spoke, Curze fingered the old scars on his throat—those bitter gifts given by his brother, the Lion. “And what will you do when I am gone, my sons? Scatter like vermin fleeing the rise of the sun? The Legion was born to teach a lesson, and that lesson will be taught. Look at you. Your lives already have such little purpose. When the blade finally falls, you will have nothing left at all.”

  The chosen regarded each other with growing unease. Talos stepped forward. “Father?”

  The primarch chuckled, his laughter the sound of waves dragging over shale. “The Hunter of One Soul. Speak.”

  “The Legion wishes to know when you will lead us to war again.”

  Curze sighed, a contemplative breath, leaning back in the ugly, shapeless throne of fused human bone. His battle armour, replete with its geography of scratches, dents and carvings, growled with idle power.

  “The Legion asks this, does it?”

  “Yes, father.”

  “The Legion no longer needs my hand upon its shoulder, for it has already ripened. Soon, it will burst, spilling itself across the stars.” The primarch lowered his head slightly, fingernails scraping along the ivory armrests. “For years, you have butchered to your hearts’ content, all of you. As Nostramo coll
apsed back into anarchy, so has the Legion. That spread will only grow worse. It is the way of things. Human life taints everything it touches, if it spreads uncontrolled. Nostramo’s sons are no exception. In truth, they are among the worst for such things. Disorder rides in their blood.”

  Here, he smiled. “But you know that, don’t you, Soul Hunter? And you, war-sage? All of you, born of the sunless world? You watched your world burn because the flaws of its people infected the Night Lords. And how beautiful it was, to immolate that sphere of sin. How righteous it felt, to truly believe it would make a difference to a poisoned Legion.”

  He snorted at the last. “How very naive of me.”

  The primarch cradled his head in his hands for several long seconds. As his sons watched, his shoulders rose and fell with slow, deliberate breathing.

  “Lord?” several of them asked at once. Perhaps their concern caused his head to rise. With shaking hands, the primarch bound his long hair into a crested topknot, keeping the dark strands from his face.

  “My thoughts are aflame this eve,” he confessed. Some of the sick gleam in his eyes faded as he reclined again, his intensity dimming. “How fares the armada we sent to Anseladon?”

  “They will arrive within the week, lord,” said Yash Kur.

  “Excellent. An unpleasant surprise for Guilliman to deal with.” Curze gestured to two servitors standing behind his throne. Both were extensively modified beneath their robes, fitted with industrial lifter spades for forearms. Each one carried a weapon in its protective embrace: an oversized gauntlet of scratched, abused ceramite, bearing slack metal talons as fingernails. Both augmented slaves approached in unison, raising their gear-driven arms with a reverent lack of haste. Like armourers of old, squires kneeling before a knight, they offered their service to their master.

  Curze rose in kind, towering above every other living being in the chamber. The omnipresent wails became true screams.

  “Sevatar,” the primarch intoned. “Come forward.”

  Hellath spoke up. “Sevatar is dead, my prince.”

  The warlord hesitated, his pale hands close to the gauntlets’ waiting ceramite sleeves. “What?”

  “My prince.” Hellath bowed low. “First Captain Sevatar is long dead.”

  Curze thrust his hands into the gauntlets, linking them to his armour. The thrum of active war plate grew louder, and the curving talons wavered as they powered up. The servitors backed away, blindly treading on several of the weeping faces, breaking noses and teeth under their heavy heels.

  “Sevatar is dead?” the primarch snarled the words, his anger mounting. “When? How?” Before Hellath could answer, the generators in Curze’s gauntlets whined to life, dripping electrical ripples down the blades’ edges.

  “My prince…” Hellath tried again. “He died in the war.”

  Curze turned his head, as if seeking a sound none of his sons could hear. “Yes. I remember it now.” The claws powered down, shedding their coating of artificial lightning. He stared around the Screaming Gallery, that unsubtle manifestation of his own inner conflict.

  “Enough talk of the past. Muster what companies remain in local systems. We must prepare for—”

  “…convulsions.”

  “I need only to seal the skin. He metabolises even specially synthesised anaesthetic with irritating speed. Hold him.”

  The prophet feels himself speaking, feels the words crawling past lips that aren’t quite numb. But they have no meaning. He tries to tell his brothers of home, of Tsagualsa, of how it felt to stand in the darkening light of their fading father’s last days.

  “The…”

  …war-sage pulled his blade from the dying Blood Angel’s throat, kicking the warrior’s breastplate to send him crashing back into the chamber.

  “Into the breach!” Captain Malcharion roared from his helm’s vox-grille. “Sons of the sunless world! Into the breach!”

  His shattered squads poured forwards, sinking another layer deeper into a palace the size of a continent. The chamber, a gallery of paintings and statuary, rained plasterwork from its ceiling onto the Night Lords below. Dust and grit clattered onto the Apothecary’s shoulder guards.

  Xarl fell into step alongside Talos as their bloodied boots crunched over marble and mosaic alike.

  “Damn the Angels, eh? They’re giving as good as they’re getting.” Breathless from the fighting, his voice was harsher than ever. Meat clogged the idling teeth of his lengthened chainblade.

  Talos could feel the weight of gene-seed vials in slot-racks attached to his armour. “We’re fighting to win. They’re fighting to survive. They’re giving it back much worse than we’re giving it to them, brother. Trust me when I say that.”

  “If you say so.” The other Night Lord stopped to crash his boot down on a mosaic relief of the Imperial aquila. Talos watched the symbol shatter, feeling his saliva glands tingle with the need to spit.

  “Hold here!” the captain called back. “Ready barricades, reinforce this chamber. Defensive positions!”

  “Blood Angels!” yelled one of the warriors at the chamber’s exit arch. The Night Lords toppled pillars and statues, using the priceless stonework as last-minute cover for the coming firefight.

  “Apothecary,” one of the sergeants called. “Talos, over here.”

  “Duty calls.” Xarl was grinning behind his faceplate. Talos nodded, breaking cover to sprint over to where another of Malcharion’s squads was taking shelter in the shadows of a fallen pillar.

  “Sir,” he said to Sergeant Uzas of Fourth Claw.

  Uzas was unhelmed, his keen eyes still watching for the Angels’ arrival. The bolter clutched against his breastplate was exquisitely wrought—a gift commissioned from the Legion’s armoury by Captain Malcharion, forged to commemorate Fourth Claw’s victories in the Thramas Crusade.

  “I’ve lost three warriors,” the sergeant confessed.

  “Their bloodlines will live on,” he said, tensing his left hand into a fist, deploying a surgical spike from his narthecium gauntlet. “I harvested each of them.”

  “I know, brother, but watch yourself. Our enemies are not blind to the responsibility you carry on your arm, and they target you almost as much as they seek to bring down the war-sage.”

  “For the Emperor!” came that inevitable cry from the chamber’s mouth.

  Talos rose with Fourth Claw, aiming above the pillar and opening fire at the Angels. Two of his shells detonated against the arch frame; the Blood Angels too canny to risk a frontal charge.

  “I had rather hoped,” Uzas reloaded in a smooth motion, “that bloodlust would drive them out into our gunfire.”

  Talos dropped back behind the pillar. “Their cover is better than ours. We have statues. They have walls.”

  Another cluster of Night Lords scrambled into cover behind the immense pillar. Vandred and Xarl were among them.

  “So much for squad cohesion,” grunted Talos.

  “Oh, you noticed?” Vandred chuckled, and tapped his cracked helm. One eye lens sported a hairline fracture down its middle. “My vox is down. Uzas?”

  The other sergeant shook his head. “Even Legion channels are corrupted. Thirty-First Company’s channel is broadcasting nothing but shrieking. Whatever is happening to them, they’re not enjoying it.”

  “I thought it was just vox-breakage,” said Vandred. “It’s nice to know we’re all suffering the same.”

  One of the Night Lords nearby rose out of cover to send another volley at the Angels. A single bolt shell cracked into his helm, wrenching it from his head in a kicking burst of shrapnel. With a curse, he crouched again, wiping blood and acidic spit from his face.

  “Do these bastards ever miss?”

  Talos regarded the depleted Tenth Company spread across the chamber. “Not often enough.”

  The warrior, Hann Vel, blind-fired over the top of the fallen pillar. The bolter in his hand exploded before the third shot, taking the Night Lord’s hand with it. Yet again the victim
of Blood Angel marksmanship, Hann Vel bellowed with a drunkard’s unfocussed fury, covering the burned stump with his remaining hand.

  With bizarrely elegant elocution, Hann Vel shouted a curse. “A plague on these red-clad sons of whores!”

  That looks painful, Talos thought, and his crooked grin went unseen in his helm. Let the warp take Hann Vel, the warrior was a fool at the best of times.

  “Captain,” Uzas was voxing. “Captain, this is Uzas.”

  The war-sage’s reply grated back on the rasping tides of static. “Yes?”

  “Three squads to charge, the rest to rise in fire support?”

  “My thoughts exactly—we’re not breaking out of this vermin pit any other way. First, Fourth and Ninth, make ready to charge.”

  “Lucky us.” Uzas smiled at the others. He drew his gladius, lifting his head to cry, “For the Warmaster! Death to the False Emperor!”

  The cheer was taken up by the others, warrior after warrior, squad after squad, screaming their hate at the Blood Angels.

  With a curse through clenched teeth, Talos…

  …saw the scene fading. That siege of sieges, the countless hours spent advancing chamber by bloody chamber through the Imperial Palace so long ago, drifted back into the recess of memory.

  “How long do these episodes last?” Variel was asking.

  “As long as they need to,” said Cyrion.

  He…

  …watched it move, with its undulating, soft-spined flow. It was human only in the loosest sense: the way one might envisage humanity if the only lore available described the species in the vaguest terms. Two arms reached from its torso. Two legs propelled it forwards in a disgustingly fluid stagger. Each limb was a malformed thing of awkward joints and bones twisted beneath the veined skin.

  Uzas’ axe crashed against the creature, ripping smoking flesh and steaming fluid away in ragged gobbets. Mist armoured its white flesh—a sculpted haze clinging to its body, with its vaporous edges offering the sick suggestion of a Legionary’s armour.