Konrad Curze the Night Haunter

by Guy Haley

  ‘Here!’ shouted Zenzitay Darr, who Elver privately thought a halfwit.

  ‘I think there is someone in there,’ said Mankor, shoving the man aside.

  ‘It’s a… It’s a man!’ Teach peered closer then stood up, looking around the crowded circle of his fellows. ‘There is someone in there!’

  The crew clustered around the small crystalflex pane. Between the shoulders of the others Elver got his glimpse. The stasis field had a weird effect on his vision. There was indeed a figure within; pale-faced, lank hair dark as nightmares, thin, bloodless lips. And he was huge, far too big to be human – far too big, it seemed, to fit in the coffin, though that was ridiculous. Elver instinctively hated it.

  He backed away while the others yammered curious questions at each other.

  ‘That’s not a man,’ said Elver. The words were choked by fear, barely escaping his lips. But nobody heard, which, as he’d reflect later, was kind of ironic, because he was right. The others had seen it too. They weren’t that stupid.

  ‘What is it?’ said one of the others. ‘Is it a…’ the man speaking couldn’t get the words out. ‘Is it a Space Marine? One of the Angels of Death?’ That was a horrendous thought. Most of the men laughed it off, but a few swore and spat. Bringing one of the Emperor’s chosen warriors aboard would bring them nothing but trouble.

  Overton stood tall, his shift in posture making the rest retreat. He sniffed loudly.

  ‘That’s no Space Marine.’ He glanced back at the figure. For the first time Elver could recall, the captain seemed cautious, even frightened. A dark warmth pressed at Elver’s mind. He felt like he was going to vomit. ‘Too big,’ Overton said, like that would explain everything.

  ‘Then what is he? He’s gene-forged, we can all see that,’ said one of the others. ‘Look at him. He’s perfect!’

  ‘What do you know? Your definition of genetic purity is having parents who aren’t related,’ said another. ‘Unlike yours!’

  The following laughter was uncertain, and died quickly. The only people talking were the family group, and they did so in nervous whispers.

  ‘No, no, Gureau’s right. He’s gene-forged alright,’ said Overton.

  Elver edged closer again, sliding between the others to get a better look. He looked into staring, open eyes with no visible white. The black of the pupil and the iris were one, indivisible black circle. The figure wore a spiteful snarl, as if he’d been time-caught delivering curses. His hair was filthy with what looked like dried blood.

  Despite this, he was beautiful.

  Elver’s world spun beneath his feet. He thought he would pass out there and then. His head became light. A thick buzzing clogged his ears, stoppering them up against external sound. He knew what he was looking at. He just knew.

  ‘He’s a primarch,’ he whispered.

  ‘What?’ The question was faint, hardly heard through the buzzing.

  Elver tottered back, half collapsing onto his crew mates. They complained loudly at his clumsiness, shoving him back and forth. Knots of darkness spun around his peripheral vision. He was finding it hard to stand.

  ‘He said he’s a primarch,’ said the fourth passenger. He pushed his way forwards.

  ‘Who are you to speak?’ said Teach.

  ‘He’s a primarch,’ said the fourth passenger. ‘That’s what you said, isn’t it?’ He spoke to Elver softly. He exuded a subtle sort of power, and the crew around him drew instinctively back.

  Elver nodded, unable to answer, still close to passing out.

  ‘There you are.’ The fourth passenger stared at Overton, unsuccessfully trying to capture his attention. ‘A primarch.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ shouted Teach. ‘They’re myths, all dead or gone into dark places.’

  ‘They’re not dead,’ shouted another. ‘Guilliman, Dorn and the rest are on Terra, aren’t they?’ He didn’t sound sure.

  ‘What’s a primarch doing out here?’ said Mankor.

  ‘It’s impossible!’

  ‘Not impossible,’ said the fourth passenger, with the air of a scholar. The crew listened to him, though ordinarily they’d have robbed a man like that, were they to find him alone. ‘There are a few unaccounted for. All of them are designated traitoris extremis.’

  ‘Ooooh!’ sang Kiner. ‘Get you. Fancy little words. High Gothic man!’

  Dangerous tension formed around the crew. The voidborn didn’t like shows of authority or knowledge, especially when it made them look stupid, or suggested they were in danger.

  The man ignored them, but addressed Overton directly. ‘Captain, I would cast this cargo out into the void, and forget you ever saw it. The consequences of not doing so will be costly to you and your crew.’

  When Overton finally deigned to look upon the passenger, he grimaced. ‘What, so you can sell on the location and get the loot for yourself? I don’t think we’re going to be doing that,’ he said. He held up his hands and shouted to the others. ‘I think, lads, that we are going to be very rich indeed!’

  Their cheers fell to groans of disgust when Elver collapsed to his knees, fumbled off his rebreather and puked hard into the deck grating.

  Curze paused in his tale.

  ‘I saw all this, while I slept,’ Curze said. ‘The thoughts of this Elver were mine to share. He was a minor talent, a psyker like you and I. That does not explain, however, why I was aware. No sensation should enter a stasis field, should it, father? Within its field time stands still. The motions of atoms are arrested. I should not have experienced anything. But I did. My mind was sluggish, but thoughts came to me nevertheless through the halted mechanics of the material universe. Now I wonder how that could possibly be?’ Curze said, tapping a filthy nail to lips pursed in a mockery of contemplation. ‘Could it be, my dear father, that your sons were things crafted with more than genomic science?’ He lifted his hands over his head, outstretched, spreading his feathered cloak wide and wafting his stale odour across the chamber. ‘My brothers always said I was a monster, but we all are. The secrets you employed to make us were not so pure as you pretended. What did you promise for the means?’ No reply forthcoming, Curze tutted. ‘Like father, like son. Horus wasn’t the only one to sell himself to the false pantheon.’

  His arms snapped down. He leaned forwards accusingly. ‘Isn’t that so? Answer me!’ he spat through a vicious snarl. ‘Were you in their thrall all the while?’

  Lacking a tongue to fill the hollow of its stolen jaw, or the life to move it, naturally the figure did not answer. Curze scowled, rallying his arguments to goad the flesh-sculpture to speak, for had it not before? It had. It had!

  Hadn’t it? It had. He was sure.

  Curze waited a while for his father to address him, but was sorely disappointed.

  THREE

  A MONSTER’S ADMISSION

  Despite the chill of Curze’s audience room, it reeked of opened guts. The smell refused to disperse. Curze didn’t care. Death’s stench could not disgust him.

  ‘I didn’t like it in the casket,’ Curze continued. ‘Sanguinius sealed me into it and pushed me from the airlock after our little jaunt around Davin. Most ungrateful. Without me, he, the Lion and Guilliman would never have ended the Ruinstorm. They would never have reached Terra. You could say Horus is dead because of me!’ he shouted, suddenly angry. He hissed through clenched, filed teeth. ‘Did I receive any gratitude? None at all. Not one of them ever had a good thing to say about me.’ He wagged his head from side to side viciously. ‘Even during your vainglorious crusade, they did not agree with my methods, though they so often yielded victory more quickly and with less bloodshed than their own favoured ways of war. They would rather have millions die to their so-called civilised bombs and mass invasions, rather than a few thousand tortured by the murderer’s knife, even when the pain of the few bought the lives of the many! They condemned me, and they beat me and they sought to drag me in chains before your throne.’ Curze leapt up, and stabbed his finger repeatedly at the grotesque sculpt
ure he had made. ‘And you were no better, saying nothing in my defence. You made me this way. You made me to be the fear in the dark. You made me to strike terror into mortal hearts. You made me an instrument of control, to force capitulation. You thought you were so clever, father. Why didn’t you explain that I was doing what I was supposed to do? Why didn’t you tell them that you approved?’

  There was still no reply. Curze paced back and forth.

  ‘You weren’t so clever after all. Look at us now! You are dead, whereas I, the unloved, hideous, wicked Konrad Curze, live! I will die before this night is out, in the manner that was ordained. Did you have that? Did you have my certainty, or did you cling to belief in your freedom of will and choose to let Horus gut you?’ He laughed bleakly. ‘Did you see that coming, oh great and marvellous Emperor?’ His mirth sank like blood into sand. ‘Did you, I wonder? Could you see all the ends of my brothers, as I did? Did you see Dorn torn to pieces, Sanguinius cut down, the Gorgon beheaded by his most beloved brother? If you did, you are a far worse monster than I.’

  He cocked his head. Hearing nothing, he scowled.

  ‘You made me this way, Master of Mankind. Another of your stupid miscalculations. You could have made me ruthless, but instead you made me evil. All your plans are so grandiose! Never subtle.’ He dropped to his haunches. ‘I don’t know when I realised I was a monster,’ Curze whispered. ‘But I remember when I thought I might be. Poor nasty, bloody Konrad Curze. What choice did he ever have? A villain, through and through. Made to bring justice, forever condemned to die for his crimes.’

  The exchanger fans vomited up a column of stinking air into Nostramo’s endless night. Blades pounded forever on squealing bearings, sucking up the foetid atmosphere from Nostramo Quintus’ deep hive levels. Second-hand heat raised the temperature of the apartment to unbearable heights and packed it from wall to wall with the thick smell of overcrowded concourses and sweaty bodies, of malfunctioning reclamation centres and stale water. Over all, the stink of trash choked her, that rich, coppery smell that fills the mouth, so close to the scent of rotten blood. It never washed from her clothes. It never washed from her hair.

  That smell was one of a long list of things Talishma would not miss. She was leaving, and she was going in her nicest dress.

  Arjash’s body had been taken from her to be recycled. All she had left of their life together, of him, were a few personal effects. She’d laid out his best suit of clothes on the bed. She thought it might be symbolic and that it would help. It did neither, for his clothes made a hollow outline far from the shape of a man. It was the best she could do. The lines of his face were blurring in her mind. The few picts she had didn’t capture the way he had looked in life. Or maybe they did, and she was forgetting already.

  The fans roared on. Their single room apartment had a solitary window. It was too hot in the summer to keep it shut. The noise of the fans demarcated their world, a wall of sound and smell that blotted out the city beyond. Lights on the next hab spire were a shimmering wash of colour, twinkling through the heated air. The grinding of groundcar engines and the wail of the horns in the canyon street played second string to the chopping of the blades. As long as she could remember, the fans had delimited her world.

  She turned slowly, taking in every part of her small quarters: the broken folding door that led to the small ablutorial, the awkward cooking space jammed up by the entrance, the chair and the chest, the only pieces of furniture in the room besides the bed… the bed. She couldn’t look at it. The bed where she had lain many nights with Arjash, content despite the song of the fans and their choking stench. The only place she had ever felt happy or safe. The bed that now waited for her body alone, where the clothes of her dead husband rested emptily.

  The fans didn’t care.

  She couldn’t stand it. She clamped her hands over her ears and stifled a scream. It was funny, given what she intended to do, that she didn’t want to scream. Screams brought trouble. She craved a little dignity at the end. She sobbed quietly, saliva running from her mouth, her eyes screwed up so tightly they vanished. Her face swelled. She never looked her best when she was weeping. Arjash always said that, teasing her tears away. A laugh tried to rise at the memory; it choked off in strangled competition with her sorrow.

  She didn’t hear the door. She didn’t hear the slice of bladed fingers breaking every one of her locks with metallic snaps. Their apartment had been burgled many times. They had many locks. The door was scarred from battery – kicked in, bashed in, broken with hydraulic jacks. This stealthy entrance was gentle compared to the boots that had put the panels through, or the blowtorches that had reduced their first lock to a puddle of metal. Entrance was conducted with respect for the occupants, the intruder keen to inflict no more damage than was strictly necessary. She was still weeping and didn’t see him when he bent double to pull his cadaverous frame through and stand, willowy yet hulking, with his inhuman head brushing the ceiling.

  But she did smell him. His pungent odour overcame the awful reek of the air exchanger. A heavy smell, redolent of death.

  Her sobs died. She took in a hitching breath, removed her hands from her ears and turned to face the creature that had come into her sanctum. She kept her eyes closed for several seconds, listening to him breathe, quiet yet audible over the thundering fans a hundred thousand lives depended on.

  ‘Night Haunter,’ she said, opening her eyes as she spoke the words.

  ‘I have come for you,’ Night Haunter said. His body was swathed in black rags stitched together from the garments of a dozen looted corpses; no tailor on Nostramo would dare outfit this nightmare.

  ‘Why?’ she said. She was too drained to feel fear. The situation was surreal. ‘I have done nothing wrong. I have lived all my life as well as I could.’

  ‘You did not dream of City’s Edge?’

  ‘Everyone dreams of City’s Edge,’ she said, her voice small yet defiant. ‘I tried to make myself into someone who could go there. I failed. But I did no wrong in trying. I have never harmed anyone, or wished to. I have suffered life here without complaint. Why are you here?’

  Night Haunter’s eyes glinted. ‘The manner of your life is not my concern. It is the manner of your death. The manner of death you have chosen is a crime.’

  He took a step forwards, looming over her.

  ‘There were, in ancient places, laws against self-murder,’ he said. ‘Suicides were buried without ceremony, in shame, and those caught attempting to kill themselves were often executed.’

  ‘But I want to die,’ she whispered.

  ‘Not the way I will end you,’ he hissed. ‘What I will do to you will make you wish you had opted to live. I am going to hurt you as much as it is possible to be hurt.’

  ‘Why?’ she breathed.

  ‘There are no taboos against taking one’s life here,’ said the Night Haunter. ‘Many do. This is not a happy world. But it can be a better one. By killing yourself, you take the easy way out, you encourage others to do the same. You might think you add yourself to a statistic, but your self-murder is much more than that. Every suicide adds to the rot weakening your culture. Every life abandoned is a signal that change can never be effected. You throw your existence away, and in doing so lessen the value of humanity.’

  He reached out a hand and ran a ragged nail gently down her face.

  ‘I am going to save you. I am going to save you all. The people of this world will rise above the station of beasts. I will make them. If I have to bathe in the blood of you all to make that happen, then so be it. Justice is my purpose. The only route to total justice is fear. Without fear there can be no order. You will suffer now to feed that fear, so that many others will live, and this decaying society take the slow road to salvation.’

  He pulled out a long knife he had made himself. It was unlovely, a murderer’s blade, but with it he could carve the most excruciating agonies.

  ‘Wait!’ she said. The blade hissed through the air.
/>   ‘Do not try,’ he said. ‘You plead for something you have already forfeited.’

  The first cut parted the skin on her arm, shoulder to little finger tip, no deeper than the dermis, for he did not want her hide to tear when he ripped it from her living body. It was so swift a movement, the blade so sharp, she did not feel it. Her first unbelieving gasp of pain only came when the blood pattered to the floor.

  She clutched her arm, her hand hopelessly unsuited to the task of closing the wound. She began to cry again, this time from fear and pain.

  Curze grinned. ‘You do not wish to die any longer. I can tell. That is unfortunate, but it must be done.’ He advanced on her. ‘Feel joy that your death will bring justice to this world. Feel joy that I bring order.’ He cut again. This time she screamed. A droplet of warm, wet red dotted his cheek. He fought the urge to lick it off. He must be sober, and serious. ‘I assure you I do not enjoy this at all.’

  His hearts quickened at the lie.

  Curze fell silent. He intended the story as evidence against his father, yet he found he did not enjoy the recollection. A thought bothered him that his actions in the apartment were not dictated by any sort of inevitability, but driven by his need to let blood. He remembered the encounter clearly. He had lied to the woman. He did enjoy his purpose. He always had.

  Did he act as he did because he had to, or because he wanted to?

  He twitched. Had he not always thought this way? Had the doubt always been there, at the back of his mind, before Sanguinius tried to tell him otherwise? His brother the Angel: cursed, like he was, to see the future, but so pure, so noble – so convinced that the run of events could be changed.

  ‘So dead,’ he tittered, but the laughter was bitter, and tinged with loss.