A Vindicator siege tank’s primary weapon mount was known among the Adeptus Astartes as a Demolisher Cannon. The weapon’s most renowned use had been ten thousand years before, when the Traitor Legions used hordes of them at the feet of Titan god-machines to breach the walls of the Emperor’s Palace.
Variel licked his teeth in distracted thought as the occulus image filled with drifting shards of twisted metal, chopping out of the smoke. He wondered how many of them had just died in that ill-advised escape plan, and suspected it was a great many.
‘Close your eyes,’ Talos warned.
Their pod had struck the ship’s underbelly, not far from the prow, leaving them relatively close to their destination. She’d never really seen the Night Lords hunt before, never seen others’ reactions to them. The crew members they did pass broke and fled at the first sight of the intruders. Whether they ran to hide or raise the alarm made no difference. First Claw let none of them live long enough to do either. Bolters banged and bucked in steady grips, implanting mass-reactive shells into the backs and legs of fleeing humans. Gladii and knives – a quick stab, a clean cut – finished off those who writhed on the ground.
Several of the people they passed were Nostraman. To a man, these fell to their knees before the warriors of the Eighth Legion, speaking praises and blessings to see such a potent reminder of their annihilated home world.
The Night Lords moved quickly, efficiently, one of them always levelling a bolter to cover the others. Seeing them like this, it was almost hard to believe the truth of how they loathed each other.
She didn’t hear them talk, just the clicking tells of vox-channel chatter. They weren’t silent by any means, with their armour growling loud enough to wake the dead, but nor were they devoid of grace.
Septimus moved at her side, his pistols drawn. Maruc huffed and puffed, his lasgun tight against his heaving chest. Hound, shortest by far, struggled to keep up at all. His mutilated features were strained by the exertion. He used his shotgun as a walking stick, and yet again, she found herself wondering how old he was.
Throne, the ship stank. If they were supposed to live here after this, she prayed someone had plans to clean it. More than once they passed dead bodies stuck to the floor in stages of advanced decay. Rot hung in the air like it belonged.
Everything made of metal sported a wet tarnish of corrosion and grime.
The Covenant was cold, and it was dark, and it was often dank. But this matched sailors’ tales of Archenemy ships. The Venomous Birthright was a Chaos ship, right through to its sickened core. She was already worried about bonding with the machine-spirit, and how abused the vessel’s soul would be when she met it at the end of this journey.
‘Close your eyes,’ Talos warned.
Her name was Ezmarellda.
The fluid she bathed in was an ammoniac clash of nutrient-rich ooze long turned foetid, and half a decade’s worth of her own urine. She was naked but for the scaling that hardened her flesh, and she was blind but for the fact she could stare into the Sea of Souls.
Her hovel was a dark chamber with the floor given over to a bowl depression, which she swam, drifted and walked through, as the mood took her. The edges of her rank pool were too high for her to reach, leaving her trapped in a pit of her own filth. She heard them enter, and her malformed face twitched this way and that. What should’ve been a mouth gummed ineffectively together, making wordless sounds whose meaning was lost to anyone but herself.
When Octavia saw her, she saw her own future laid bare. All Navigators suffered devolution as the centuries passed. She knew that. But this...
First Claw moved around the pool, and Ezmarellda tried to follow each of their movements by the tread of their armoured boots. She had no way of knowing that five bolters were aiming right at her.
Septimus covered his mouth, even though his eyes were closed. Maruc turned to throw up, though nothing he could’ve contributed to the pool would have made it any worse. Hound did nothing, either because he’d never been able to see, or because he was inured to such things. He stared at Octavia, as he always did.
Octavia had no reason to close her eyes. She was the only one bearing witness to this, and in a way, she was grateful. This was Navigator business. This was as Navigator business as things could possibly be.
‘Can we use her?’ Xarl asked in a crackle of vox. He’d not seen it, yet still his bolter tracked its every twitch.
Octavia didn’t answer.
The Navigator turned at the sound of Xarl’s voice. Ezmarellda waded through her liquid muck on clubbed limbs, drooling and smiling. She treaded water in the ripe, watery slime, and reached up with hands that had already begun a painful fusion into clawed flippers.
‘Hello.’ The Navigator’s voice was creakingly infantile – a grandmother with her mind lost to dementia, speaking the way she had as a little girl. Saying a single word sent blood-pinked drool trickling down her chin, and she seemed eager to speak, to say more, apparently unaware of how difficult it was for her to form words.
Octavia touched the offered limb, her fingertips soft against its leathery flesh.
‘Hello,’ she said back. ‘Did... Huron bring you here? To live?’
Ezmarellda turned in the water, her twisted spine making it difficult to remain in one position for long. As she moved, a bleached skull rolled up from below the water, bobbing on the scummy surface.
‘This is my ship.’ The Navigator licked at her melted lips with a flapping black tongue. ‘This is my ship.’
Octavia backed away.
‘No,’ she said. ‘We really can’t.’
Five bolters opened up in perfect unity.
There was no way she’d get down in the water.
Octavia sat by the doorway, her back against a wall gone mouldy with eternal condensation.
‘I can pilot us from here.’
Talos conceded to it easily, given the circumstances. ‘I will leave Uzas and Xarl to watch over you.’
She nodded, but didn’t thank him.
Maruc was still staring in horror at what floated face-down in the reddened ooze below. ‘Throne of the God-Emperor,’ he said for the fourth time.
‘He wasn’t a god,’ Cyrion said with an edge of irritation in his tone. ‘I know. I met him once.’
The chamber looked worse with her eyes closed. She saw as Ezmarellda had seen, the layers of bloated, cancerous corruption clinging invisibly to everything around her. The Sea of Souls had lapped against this ship’s hull in the past, but the taint hadn’t yet taken true root. Its blight was brought by its crew, not nestled within the iron bones.
At first, the machine spirit flinched away from her, despite its power. She moaned as she reached to her wrist, screwing the connection valve implanted there and locking the interface cable tighter.
You are not my Navigator, it told her, just as the Covenant once had. Its voice was deeper, yet more guarded.
Yes, I am, she repeated the same words she’d pulsed to the other ship so many months before. My name is Octavia. And I will treat you with more respect than any other Navigator you’ve sailed with.
Suspicion. Disbelief. The suggestion of claws hidden in psychic sheaths. Why?
Because that is how my father raised me.
+ Jump + an intruding voice wavered through her thoughts. The sorcerer, Ruven, on the Covenant. + Octavia. Jump +
We have to sail, she told the Echo.
Show me the way.
+ Now +
Now.
Now.
At the edge of the Red Corsair armada, two warships fired their engines with calculated precision. They both drifted forwards, gaining speed, their hulls parallel in form as well as formation.
Destroyer squadrons were already en route. Several other cruisers were coming about, their captains aiming to blockade the accelerating capital ships.
The void tore open before both ancient strike cruisers as their armoured prows punctured through from this realm into the next.
With a swirl of colours reminiscent of migraines and madness, the twin wounds in reality burst open to swallow both vessels whole.
The inbound ships shivered as reality reasserted itself. On their bridges, captains cursed to find their weapons now locked on empty space.
The Covenant of Blood tore back out of the warp soon after, manifesting several star systems away as its commander had intended.
Their warp-wake would take an age to track, mixing with the undercurrents already swirling around Vilamus from such a huge fleet arriving only hours before. The Exalted felt no cause for concern.
Freed of the coronal flares, the warship’s systems came back to life with a rising swell of power and muted sighs of relief from the crew.
‘Auspex, aye.’
‘Vox, aye.’
But the Exalted was barely listening. The creature raised itself from its throne, and gazed out into the black.
‘Where is the Echo of Damnation?’
XXIII
RESPITE
The Echo of Damnation coasted to a drift, engine contrails streaming to misty points that vanished into the void.
Talos hadn’t sat in the throne yet, and he wasn’t certain he wanted to. Variel had been pleased to see him arrive on the command deck, insofar as Variel was ever pleased by anything.
‘Tell me everything,’ said Talos. ‘We took the ship with no resistance at all. How did you manage it?’
‘I attempted to jettison the Corsairs into space,’ the Apothecary admitted. ‘When that failed, I settled for imprisoning them.’
‘Where?’
‘The hangar bays. They sought to attempt an escape by loading and firing the main armament of a Vindicator siege tank.’
Talos cycled through live pict-feeds of the hangar bays. Two stood empty and powered down. The other two... Talos cast a slow look at the former Red Corsair.
‘That explains the holes in the hull,’ Cyrion said, looking around Talos’s shoulder.
‘I believe their short-range vox was active, for they attempted it in both bays at corresponding times. The results were very much as you’d imagine when a Demolisher cannon is fired at grievously short range.’
‘It worked, though,’ Mercutian pointed out.
‘If you are referring to the twin hull-breaches, then yes, their mission was a resounding success. If you’re referring to the fact the explosions and resulting blast-waves killed almost a quarter of them, then the results are somewhat less spectacular.’
Cyrion sucked air through his teeth. With his helm vocaliser on, it was a mechanical rattlesnake’s hiss. ‘You mean they went marching over the hull after they blew a hole in the landing bay?’
‘Yes. Caleb led them out, no doubt seeking a judicious point of entry to cut their way back into the ship with power weapons.’
Talos chuckled, low and soft. ‘Then they were on the external hull when we jumped.’
‘Almost definitely. I watched it happening to several of them, who were in range of the external picters. It was an illuminating scene. To see armour, then flesh, then bone itself dissolve into the Sea of Souls. The speed with which they were flensed by the jagged tides of the warp was most humbling to witness. Most lost their holds on the hull the very same moment they were struck by the first waves. But I did get to study a few of them, watching them being utterly taken to pieces by tides of molten psychic energy.’
Even Cyrion winced.
‘Blood of the Father, Variel.’ Talos shook his helmed head. ‘That is a cold way to kill.’
The Apothecary looked thoughtful. ‘I was hoping you’d be impressed.’
‘I am,’ Talos confessed. ‘I only wish I’d thought of it myself.’ The prophet called over to the vox console, addressing the three officers there. ‘Hail the Covenant of Blood.’
The lead officer lowered his hood, as if deciding the traditional scarlet robe of a Corsair serf was no longer appropriate given the vessel’s new owners.
‘Lord, the Covenant of Blood isn’t in hail range.’
‘Auspex,’ Talos ordered. ‘We cannot have arrived before them; the jump was too short.’
‘Lord, the auspex is clean of ally and enemy alike. We’re in the deep void.’
‘Scan again. We were supposed to break from the warp in the Reghas system.’
The Master of Auspex consulted a data-slate. A moment later, he transmitted his findings directly to the hololithic projector table. The Echo’s signifier rune winked, gold and lonely, far from anything else of any import. Even the closest star was millions of kilometres away.
‘We are approximately two hours’ full sail from Reghas, lord.’
Every member of First Claw said the name in the same breath. ‘Octavia.’
She disconnected with a shiver, finding herself in the last place she wanted to be. The damp air moved through her lungs with the oily, cold feel of trapped mucus. Ezmarellda’s body, as with her pool of fluids, enriched the air with the spicy stink of old disease.
Octavia wiped her eyes on her sleeves, still trembling a little from the Echo’s eagerness. Once she’d opened herself to the machine-spirit, it responded in kind, leaping forwards with a fierce will. It reminded her of a horse abused by its former master, as if the simple act of running free from its master would cleanse its body of whip scars. The Echo bolted forwards with the merest touch of her mind, clinging to that same desperation: as if by putting distance between itself and the Maelstrom, it could escape the indignities of its own recent past.
And like a spirited stallion, it had been a nightmare to control at first. It wanted to run, and it didn’t care where. She’d managed to wrench its excitable kineticism vaguely in the right direction, but she suspected they were still a fair degree off-course.
Talos would likely be disappointed in her, but she couldn’t bring herself to care just yet.
Octavia retied her bandana. Like the rest of her, like the rest of the chamber, it smelled somewhere between bad and awful.
‘Mistress.’
Hound limped over to her, sitting heavily by her side. She could hear the ragged rhythm of the little man’s heartbeat in his quavering breaths. In the marshy half-light of the fluid chamber, he looked even paler, even sicker, even older.
‘I am tired,’ he confessed, though she’d not asked. ‘Running through the ship to keep up with you all. It made me tired.’
‘Thank you for staying with me.’
‘No need for thanks. Staying with you is what I always do.’
She rested her arm around his lumpy shoulders, leaned closer to him, and cried silently into his ragged cloak.
Awkwardly, he embraced her with his bandaged arms.
‘I had a daughter once,’ he admitted quietly. ‘She sounded the same as you. Soft. Sad. Strong. Perhaps she looked the same as you, as well. I do not know. I have never really seen you.’
She sniffed. ‘I’ve looked better, anyway.’ After a pause, she smiled slightly. ‘I have black hair. Did she?’
Hound’s thin, chapped lips creased into a smile. ‘She was Nostraman. All Nostramans have black hair.’
She drew breath to answer, but he hushed her with a quick Shhh.
‘Mistress,’ he said. ‘Someone comes.’
The door opened to reveal Septimus. Beyond him, Xarl and Uzas still stood guard further down the corridor. She heard their helms clicking as they no doubt argued in private. Xarl seemed to be trying to make a point. Uzas seemed to be ignoring it.
‘Apparently,’ the other serf looked reluctant to speak, ‘we missed our mark. Talos wants you to be ready to guide the ship again.’
Without a word, she reached for the connection cable. Until she fully bonded with the ship and had her own throne installed, it would have to do.
Brekash of the Bleeding Eyes moved down the corridor, walking bipedal but pausing every few steps to sniff at the foul air. Like First Claw, the Bleeding Eyes had boarded and found little in the way of sport, and nothing in the way of resistance.
Brekash paused again, sniffing to his left.
Something scraped within the wall. Something with talons.
Brekash sent a questing blurt of noise from his mouth grille, not quite speech, not quite a screech.
A growl answered, muffled by the metalwork. Something trapped within the ship’s iron skin? Vermin, perhaps.
Brekash wasn’t sure what to do. He reached for his chainsword in a half-hearted, irritated way, but didn’t key the activation rune. Another grunt preceded three dull thumps, as if knuckles knocked on the other side of the wall.
In reply, he scratched his clawed gauntlet down the side of the corridor as a warning to whatever mutated vermin dwelled back there.
‘Lucoryphus,’ he voxed. ‘There is... a thing inside a wall, here.’
The leader of the Bleeding Eyes halted on his own patrol of the Echo’s filthy decks.
‘Repeat,’ he voxed.
Brekash’s repetition came back garbled, and Lucoryphus let a mocking caw trickle over the vox. ‘You leap at shadows, brother.’
Brekash gave a series of staccato, clipped shrieks – the most shameful sound Lucoryphus had ever heard a brother Raptor utter in his life, for it mimicked the distress cry of a Nostraman condor.
Then, with a porcelain crack of finality, the link went dead.
‘Soul Hunter,’ the Raptor leader voxed, ‘something hunts us on this ship.’
The warrior who’d called himself Caleb Valadan – among a host of other titles earned in service to the Tyrant of Badab – had not died the glorious death he’d always foreseen for himself. There was no heaped pile of enemy dead to stand upon while he bled his last; no cheering voices as his honoured brothers saluted and praised the victorious dead.
He’d not even had a weapon in his hand when the last of his mortality fled, as if he’d been some toothless old man dying in a sickbed, rather than a champion of two centuries’ worth of battle.
Caleb had known two things as he died. The first was pain. The second was fire.
He was unable to determine where one ended and the other began, or even if the two things held any distinction given what had happened. But he remembered them above all else.
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