His vision wavered, rippling lines of distortion dancing across his lens displays. Runes warped and cancelled. Electrical distortion. A great deal of it. It was killing his helm’s input receptors.
So much power. Talos scanned the control room, large enough for a staff of thirty or more, though devoid now of all life. Void shields? This much power couldn’t be purely for lighting the multi-towered spire above. These generators must also power the prison’s void shields, preventing orbital bombardment or meteor strike.
Defending a fortress full of criminals from death, though they were slated for execution anyway? Ah, the wasteful ignorance of the Imperium of Man.
Anathema boomed out a volley of bolt shells that hammered in a wide spread across the control consoles before him.
His vision cleared. Darkness fell. Silence, at last, followed.
It was not an immediate process. At first the darkness was broken by the crackling death rattles of the destroyed consoles, lighting the blackness like bolts of lightning. When the ruined control consoles spat their last, his vision stabilised just as darkness fell. True, absolute darkness, imaginable only by those who lived life without ever seeing the sun.
Next came the silence. The twenty generator towers took almost a minute to die. Great hulks, strangled of attention and starved of willpower without the guiding signal of the control consoles. Within the observation room, failsafe systems roared into life with flashing red sirens. Talos emptied the rest of his magazine into the failsafe station, turning his head from the resulting explosion.
Once more, there was darkness. The generator towers rattled and clanked and whined down into stillness over the course of another forty-six seconds, and then, blessedly, there was silence over the self-contained generatorium city.
Talos crashed through the control room windows, falling twenty metres, landing smoothly on the ground floor’s decking with a tremendous bang of ceramite on iron. He looked into the darkness, listened to the silence, and breathed a single word.
‘Preysight.’
Indriga wasn’t spooked.
He was, however, losing his temper. The others were getting twitchy with the lights going out and the generator towers dying. The girl wasn’t struggling anymore, but that was hardly any reassurance. She’d already bitten and clawed chunks out of Edsan and Mirrick, and Indriga had a feeling lurking at the back of his mind that the dangerous bitch was just waiting for the right moment to lash out again.
Between two powering-down towers, the four men froze in the darkness. The crash of destroyed glass had reached them even over the towers’ death whines. Handheld lampsticks speared into life as Indriga and Edsan turned on the shotgun-mounted lights they’d taken from slain prison guards.
The girl moaned, coughing loud enough to make Indriga jump.
‘Shut her up,’ he whispered. ‘And keep your damn light on the ground.’
Edsan obeyed, lowering his stolen gun so the beam was no longer lancing off into the avenues between the towers. ‘You just messed your pants, Indri. I saw you jump like you were shot.’ It wasn’t mockery in Edsan’s voice. It was something not far from panic.
‘I ain’t spooked,’ Indriga whispered back. ‘Just lower your Throne-damned voice.’
Edsan didn’t reply at first. Indriga sure looked spooked, and that meant bad things. Indri was a hive ganger like most of them, but his skin was black with tats listing his kill counts and blasphemous beliefs. You didn’t get that big without being vat-grown or significantly cut up and put back together by some augmetic-hungry doc, that’s for sure.
When his nerves got the better of him, he said ‘Indri. There’s four of us, right? That’s good, yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
Edsan had the distinct feeling Indriga wasn’t listening to him at all. That was nothing new – Indriga was big news in R Sector, he’d never had time for small-time players like Edsan – but this time, it wasn’t like Indriga was brushing him off out of disrespect. This time, Indri just looked like he could smell fire around the corner and was thinking about making a run for it.
It was weird. Looking at him now, he was like one of the beefy attack dogs Edsan’s boss used to use in pit fights. Gene-changed to be hulks of slab-like muscle and wide jaws, and before a dog fight they’d be tense and shivering, staring off at stuff only they could see. They were glanding stimms, sure, but it was still weird to see an animal so… focused. Indriga looked like that now. Shivering but rigid, staring at… Well, that was the problem. Like those ugly dog-things, he was staring at the Emperor only knew what.
‘You see something?’ Edsan whispered.
‘No. Can hear it, though.’
And then, just like that, Edsan heard it, too. Maybe the girl did too, because she moaned again, earning a slap from Mirrick, who was still bleeding, still back there with her. A new noise blended with the fading howl of the generators. Something rhythmic, like the metal thunk-thunk-thunk of… of… of something. Edsan didn’t even know what it sounded like. He’d never heard it before. His slippery mind fixed on the only comparison it could hold on to in his rising panic. Like the footsteps of a giant. When he would learn the truth of the matter less than a minute later, he’d be horrified to see how accurate he’d been.
Indriga raised his shotgun. ‘Someone’s coming.’
‘For her?’ Edsan swallowed. Indriga’s slow caution was shredding his nerves. This was bad. Maybe they could leave the girl and get out of here. ‘Indri… Are they coming for her?’
Eurydice spoke for the first time since she’d been taken. Through swollen lips, she sneered the words, ‘No. He’s coming for you.’
Of the Emperor’s sons, one had always stood apart from his brothers.
Through a twist of fate that would herald the human race’s eventual unmaking, the twenty progeny of the Emperor were stolen from their father. As vat-grown infants – who had been painstakingly flesh-forged as biological masterpieces in the labyrinthine gene-labs beneath the surface of Terra – they were engineered to be all that was idyllic and noble in the human form. Avatars, as it were, of mankind’s perfection.
Their exaltations and degenerations are chronicled in numerous tomes of mythology and factual record, variously forgotten by most mortals of the Imperium in the ten thousand year span, sequestered by the Inquisition, or so distorted by the passage of time as to barely resemble the truth.
Though all twenty sons would one day be reunited with their sire as the Emperor reached out to conquer the stars in His Great Crusade, nineteen of these sons were raised, for better or worse, by surrogate mentors. Their incubation pods plunged from the skies of twenty worlds, and twenty planets played home and paid homage to godlike beings that would rise to shape the destiny of each world as they grew to adulthood.
On Chemos, a world of manufactories and pollution so thick it blanketed the sky in a drape of vile orange mist, the primarch Fulgrim rose through the ranks of drone workers and executives to become the lord of the fortress-factories, heralding in a new age of resource and prosperity for his people.
On Caliban, the austere primarch known as the Lion grew to lead a glorious crusade of knightly orders against the tainted beasts of his home world’s forests. On Fenris, legends have the Primarch Leman Russ first raised by the vicious wolves of that icy world, then reaching his majority to lead the barbarous warrior clans as their greatest high king.
On a nameless world, its title long-lost to the mists of time, the Primarch Angron reached adulthood as a pit slave, shackled by the lords of his apparently civilised planet, forever twisted by the experiences of his bloodthirsty maturation.
For better or worse, fate had each Imperial son raised by others, shaped by instructors, guides, mentors, friends and enemies. Only one primarch grew up alone, hidden from the eyes of humanity, guided by no hand and taught by no elder.
He would come, in time, to be known by the name his father had chosen for him: Konrad Curze. To the people of Nostramo, the world forever wrapped in
nightfall’s embrace, he was – at least at first – altogether less human. Never did the primarch bear a human name there.
The child survived by living feral in the shadows of humanity’s towers. He scavenged in the alleys and streets of Nostramo Quintus, the planetary capital, a sprawling metropolis that covered a sizeable portion of the northern hemisphere. Crime here, as it was across all Nostramo, was as rife as life itself. With no moral compass beyond the evidence of his own eyes, the young primarch began the work that would shape his existence.
The seed of his endeavour was humble enough at first, at least by the standards of Imperial justice. Street-level criminals; the murderers, the rapists, the thugs, gangers and muggers that populated the dark avenues of Nostramo Quintus soon began to whisper a name that flowed from their lips with fearful tremors.
The Night Haunter.
He would kill them. Barely into his teens, the boy would witness an act of violence or crime, and he would leap from the shadows, feral and enraged, butchering those who preyed upon their fellow humans. This was how the nascent core of his humanity sought to enforce order upon his surroundings.
Fear, primal and true, was something the young god understood all too well. He saw its uses and applications, and he saw how those in the thrall of terror were so much more pliant and obedient. In those black streets, he learned the lesson that would shape his Legion. Humanity did not need kindness, indulgence or trust in order to progress. People did not comply with law and live lives of order out of altruism or shared ideology.
They obeyed society’s tenets because they were afraid. To break the law invited justice. Within justice was punishment.
He became that punishment. He became the threat of justice. Known criminals were left for all to see come the weak dawn: crucified and disembowelled, chained to the walls of public building and the ornate doors of the wealthiest gang leaders and syndicate bosses. Always, he would leave their faces untouched, twisted with the silent and fixed scream of an agonising death, for he knew the dead gazes of the slain triggered a deeper empathy and realisation within the hearts of those who met their glazed stares.
Years passed, and many more died. Soon enough, the Night Haunter was reaching his pale, grasping hands into the higher tiers of society, beating, strangling and slaughtering the ringleaders, the organisers, the officials at the core of the city’s corruption. The fear that so thickly saturated the streets soon choked the halls of the wealthy and powerful.
The rule of law reigned. Victory and compliance through the threat of punishment. Order through fear.
It is said in the records of the VIII Legion that when the Emperor came to Nostramo, he spoke these words to his long-lost son:
‘Konrad Curze, be at peace, for I have arrived and intend to take you home.’
The primarch’s reply is also recorded. ‘That is not my name, Father. I am Night Haunter.’
Perhaps the sons of Konrad Curze, had their sire been raised upon another world and learned different lessons, would have been more typical Astartes, and the VIII Legion a far cry from the driven creatures they were at the edge of the forty-first millennium. But the sons of the Night Haunter learned every lesson their gene-father did, carrying the same truths with them down the centuries.
‘Soul Hunter,’ the primarch had once said to Talos.
‘My lord?’ he had answered, unable as ever to meet his father’s direct gaze. He concentrated on the Night Haunter’s midnight war-plate, decorated by lightning bolts painted by the finest tech-artisans of Mars, and bearing the skulls of so many fallen foes on chains like hanging fruit.
‘Soon, Soul Hunter.’
The melancholic tone of his lord’s voice was not new. The whispered reverence was. Surprise made Talos raise his eyes to his father’s face, gaunt and nearly lipless, the pale, dull grey of sunrise on a dead world.
‘Lord?’
‘Soon. We run from the hounds my father set at our heels, and vindication must be bought with blood.’
‘Vindication is always bought with blood, lord.’
‘This time, the blood-price will be mine to pay. And willingly, my son. Death is nothing compared to vindication. Die with the truth on your lips, and your life’s echo will never fade.’
His father spoke on, but Talos heard none of it. The words were like a blade of cold fire in his gut.
‘You will die,’ he breathed. ‘I knew this would come, my lord.’
‘Because you have seen it,’ the primarch grinned. As always, the smile was without any mirth. The Night Haunter had never, to Talos’s knowledge, displayed any human emotion approaching genuine humour. He was amused by nothing. He enjoyed nothing. Even the bloodiest moments of war set his features in a grim mask of concentration and infrequent disgust. Battle-lust seemed beyond him, or he had transcended its feverish joys.
This was the result of sacrificing one’s humanity for the good of the Imperium’s people. And he would be repaid for his great sacrifice – repaid by the Emperor’s assassins seeking his lifeblood.
‘Yes, lord,’ Talos replied, his mouth drying, his deep voice like a child’s compared to the throaty rumble of his father’s. ‘I have seen it. How did you know?’
‘I hear your dreams,’ the primarch replied. ‘We share a curse, you and I. The curse of foreknowledge. You are like me, Soul Hunter.’
It didn’t feel like an honour. Despite feeling no greater kinship with the primarch than in that moment, there was no honour, just a sense of vulnerability that threatened to eclipse even his awe at standing in the shadow of his godlike gene-sire. They would share words only once more before the Night Haunter greeted his death, and without it being spoken, Talos knew this, too.
What brought these thoughts flooding back to his mind now? The rush of instinct, the thrill of the hunt? Galvanised, Talos broke into a run. Eurydice’s life rune pulsed on his retinas like the unstable ticking of a broken engine. She was wounded, that much was clear. Her implantation was crude and functional, revealing little of specifics. He heard Eurydice’s muffled breathing, the heightened heartbeats of her captors, and exaggerated his footfalls so they would know he approached.
Then, when he judged the moment right, when he could hear them whispering their fears to one another, the hunter ghosted into the shadows, turning his tread soft, standing in wait.
One of the mortals walked past the Night Lord’s hiding place between two man-sized capacitor cylinders, his skin reeking of grime and terror-sweat. Talos resisted the urge to lick his lips.
‘Greetings,’ he said in a low, smiling voice.
The shotgun bucked and blasted noise into the silence. The convict had fired his weapon in panic even before he turned. He had less than a heartbeat of looking into the blackness, seeing a pair of arched red eyes glaring, before Talos was on him.
His death was regrettably quick, and Talos mourned the chance to make it last. The corpse, its neck snapped, fell to the metal decking with a crumpling thud. The Night Lord was already gone.
‘Edsan?’ someone called. ‘Edsan?’
‘He’s dead,’ said a voice behind him. Mirrick managed a breathless, wordless grunt of surprise before his head left his shoulders. Talos ignored the tumbling body, but caught the head before it fell.
Gripping it by its lank, greasy hair, he moved on through the darkness. In his gauntleted fist, the head still twitched with facial tics for several moments.
The third to die was Sheevern.
Sheevern had remained with the woman, standing over her with a power maul in his hands. Like most of the prisoners, he’d acquired the weapon from an enforcer guard in the riot. Unlike most of the prisoners, he was innocent of the crimes he’d been incarcerated for.
Sheevern was no heretic. He was serving his sentence for ties to a deviant ruling cult from a world that had forsworn the Dictate Imperialis, and broken from Imperial rule. As a politician in the regime, he had been charged with heresy when the Imperium of Man came to take the world back from the gr
asp of the tainted rulers, despite the fact that he’d argued against secession from the Throne. He found it bitterly ironic to be serving a life sentence for heresy, when he’d spent a good twenty years in office, secretly indulging his true lusts and urges without any of his actions coming to the light. The blood of five women and two young men was on his hands. Sheevern regretted nothing. He didn’t believe he had anything to regret.
‘Indriga?’ he called out. No answer. By his feet, the woman whisper-laughed again. He thudded a boot into her side, feeling something – a rib or two, maybe – snap under his kick. ‘Shut the hell up.’
His ears itched. A buzzing, like a swarm of insects, was irritating his senses. ‘What the hell is that sound?’ he muttered, clutching the maul tighter in his thin-fingered hands.
It was the thrum of live mark IV Astartes war-plate. Talos emerged from the darkness ahead of him, illuminated only by the dim glow of Sheevern’s personal lamp pack.
‘Catch,’ the Night Lord said. Despite the growl of his helm’s vox speakers, he sounded almost amiable.
On instinct, Sheevern caught what was thrown. He cradled it one-handed for a moment before dropping it with a gasp. His hand and arm were warm with blood. Mirrick’s head banged on the gantry floor.
‘Wait,’ Sheevern begged the resolving shape. ‘I didn’t touch her!’ he lied. Eurydice’s bare foot hit the back of his knee as she lashed out in a furious kick.
Sheevern stumbled, righting himself just in time to meet the Night Lord’s bolter hitting his face. The muzzle of the oversized weapon hammered into his panting mouth, making shards of his teeth, the cold metal forcing its way to the back of his throat. He barely had time to squeal a muffled protest before the bolter bucked and sheared the chubby former politician’s head clean off.
Talos backhanded the headless body aside and stared down at Eurydice. She was battered and bruised, her clothing torn, one eye swollen shut. She still looked a lot better than Septimus had, though. Nothing here wouldn’t heal, at least in regards to the physical damage she’d sustained.
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