Konrad Curze the Night Haunter

by Guy Haley

  He felt nothing, not even pity.

  His scrutiny sent her scrabbling back over sacks of ancient filth, clutching her ruined clothes to herself, more terrified of her rescuer than she was of her assailants. With nowhere to go, she stopped, pinned by his unblinking gaze to a bed of refuse, frozen as prey in the eyes of a hawk.

  He looked away. Nothing to learn there. No understanding of why these men had attempted to do what they had, only a desire to stop it; not for the girl’s sake, never to save the innocent. He did not care about individuals. He cared about order.

  The Night Haunter gave the girl’s attacker a two-minute head start before casting aside the dead youth and setting off in pursuit. The girl he left behind, still vulnerable. No offer was made to escort her home and see her safe. The punishment of the crime was of more importance than her life, such was the Night Haunter’s understanding of justice – uncompromised by doubt, vengeance, mercy or ethics. Order must rule, or else there was only chaos.

  He left the alley in a rush of black, leaping from wall to wall to avoid the yielding morass of rubbish. In places he scuttled along the brickwork in a display of acrobatics that appeared to defy physics. He had given his prey time to run a little ahead to prolong the chase, but not so long that he could escape.

  Never that.

  The boy’s name was Karzen, not that many people cared, and none would remember. A life blighted by torment and uplifted solely by adrenaline jags of random cruelty was coming to a close.

  The Night Haunter is coming. The words locked his mind up. The Night Haunter is coming. Round and round they went on tracks, like the sky-vids for the long-distance inter-hive trains he could never afford to ride.

  The Night Haunter!

  He blundered through stinking mounds towards the lights of a larger street. The road ahead belonged to the Crimson Coda – not Karzen’s gang, and way out of his own territory. Being caught there would be a death sentence, but his pursuer trumped any danger posed by lesser men, and he flung himself towards the road as if it were the safest sanctuary in all the universe.

  The sound of traffic rumbled up the alley. The piled rubbish petered out to a layer of damp, compacted dross. The boy’s heart raced and his breathing bubbled in his throat, mixed with phlegm and surges of vomit. His legs were like rubber. He could not run properly, though his heart and his mind screamed at his body to move. He’d seen the effect of fear in others, when he hunted with his pack-kin, chasing down rivals or easy meat to cut and rob. It made him laugh to see their terror. He didn’t like it now he felt it himself.

  There was the street, the lines of light and activity where rundown Old Town gave out to proper places, where the buildings were tall like buildings should be, and groundcars raced along four-lane carriageways to unguessable destinations. Fate cruelly dictated that the last stretch to safety be long. He saw pedestrians passing the alley entrance, heads down and eyes sharp. Groundcars whisked by, headlights brighter than deep-hive rats’ eyes, the occupants snug and safe behind armoured glass. A hive spire rose on the far side of the road, the lower windows dark, covered over with grilles and mostly broken, but the higher ones glowed – domiciles where families lived, safe places as any on that violent world.

  Safety. People. He glanced over his shoulder, dared a grin when he did not see the Night Haunter on his trail.

  The boy came within touching distance of salvation. A dagger blade of lemon light cut into the alley’s darkness, throwing long shadows from every lump of trash and turning the chemical rain into droplets of molten diamond. Karzen stumbled in a half-sprint, fingertips reached for the street, so close to the light, gasping with relief.

  The terror in the dark took him then, on the cusp of hope. An iron hard hand closed around his ankle and yanked him back into the dark.

  Nothing but a faint scream escaped into the traffic. On the streets of Nostramo Quintus, nobody heeded such a sound. The pedestrians and cars hurried on, caring only for their own lives.

  The Night Haunter had him. Karzen swung around in its grasp as the beast scaled the side of a building, dragging itself up crumbling rockcrete one-handed. Karzen thought he would freeze from the terror, start to beg like the weak always did in the face of the strong, but animal instincts overrode his petrified consciousness and forced him to fight. He did so without finesse, but with great strength and savagery, all limitations the human body places upon itself to avoid damage removed in this last ditch attempt to live. He might as well have clawed at a mountain. Compared to the supernatural might of the Night Haunter, he was less than nothing.

  At the top of the wall the Night Haunter threw Karzen overhand onto the roof. He felt something break in his ankle even before he bounced hard on the rockcrete, scraping skin off knees, palms and a good part of his face.

  He blubbered, hardly daring to lift his eyes. When he did, he was alone again. The monster had gone. He collapsed and lay sprawled, looking over his shoulder. He wiped his hand over his face, clearing his eyes of stinging water. No sign of his tormentor.

  Pain burned his foot when he got up. It didn’t stop him. Nothing could. Terror had its lash across his back. He hobbled towards the far side of the building, where again the light of the street beckoned him. Advertising strobes coloured him with fragments of slogans for products he could never afford, dazzling as they swept past and plunged the area back into gloom.

  A heavy strike broke four of Karzen’s ribs and sent him back down. He managed to roll over before the thing was on him again, a huge, merciless hand snatching his feeble boy’s arm away from the knife holstered at his side. A second hand encircled his skinny ribcage, pinning him to the roof. Karzen screamed and punched ineffectually at his captor. The Night Haunter leaned over into the blows, taking them on his angular face. Karzen punched and punched until his knuckles split. The Night Haunter did not so much as flinch. Panting, Karzen let his hand flop down to the roof.

  This was the Night Haunter: a pallid face of hard angles. Eyes as black as any Nostraman’s glittered with an inhuman intelligence. Thin lips parted. Seeing how white and even his teeth were, Karzen saw his captor anew. He was filthy, and stank with street living and careless murders, but under the grime he was…

  ‘Perfect,’ whispered the boy.

  The Night Haunter tilted his head, intrigued. The rain fell heavily. Wet, reeking hair brushed against Karzen’s cheek. Water rusty with old blood coursed from it.

  ‘What are you?’ said Karzen, his fear pushed aside by unexpected awe. He didn’t expect an answer, certainly not the one he received.

  ‘Justice.’ The Night Haunter’s reek breathed over the boy’s face, a stew of raw meat and bad blood.

  ‘Justice?’ gasped the boy, a ludicrously quaint word, rarely heard on Nostramo.

  ‘Justice,’ said the Night Haunter. ‘Justice is the underpinning of civilisation. Without justice, there is no peace. There is no quiet. There is no calm.’

  He released Karzen’s hand. The boy made no attempt to go for his knife, but watched as the pale fist clenched, leaving fore and index fingers out, black nails ready to drive into his eyes and the brain behind.

  And then the Night Haunter gave a low moan, staggered upright, tottered a few feet and collapsed in a drift of ragged black cloth.

  Sensations of another time and place hit the Night Haunter with the force of a collapsing building.

  His prey wheeled away into a tiny, black dot. Other sights burgeoned in his place, swelling from motes of sapphire light to scenes of living reality. Two laid over each other in complex interdimensionality, differing images pushing through each other, yet remaining whole.

  He saw himself, taken with a moment’s doubt, a questioning of his assumptions that had him pause as the boy pushed himself backwards along the rooftop and Night Haunter extended a saviour’s hand instead of an executioner’s blow. Hesitantly, the boy stopped. The boy reached out. The boy…

  …Karzen. The name came to him from unrealised futures…

&
nbsp; …the boy grew under his guidance. His horizons expanded beyond the criminal margins that had trammelled him. A life of good works beckoned, more killers taken from the streets and changed, like he, from murderers to mentors, by the spreading of the word of the Night Haunter, each transformed soul a little force to the lever of change until, with rushing power, the rules of blood were scratched out and a new social contract took hold.

  For this, the boy thanked the Night Haunter, and he was loved for the change he brought.

  This happened.

  But this also happened.

  The Night Haunter saw himself, taken with a moment’s doubt, a questioning of assumptions that had him pause as the boy pushed himself backwards along the rooftop and Night Haunter extended a saviour’s hand instead of an executioner’s blow.

  The boy took his chance, and rammed his knife hard into the Night Haunter’s side, some fluke pushing it through the armoured box of his ribcage and into the meat of his primary heart.

  That would not kill him. It could not, but it hurt, oh it hurt. And the boy…

  …Karzen. Same boy, different future…

  …the boy lived. The boy prospered. His legend as the man who had faced the terror in the dark grew and grew. A rise to power greased with blood, a climb to the heights of influence upon a ladder made of raw bones. A thousand killings he committed, at first by his own hand then at his command, and still it was not enough to garner all he craved. Money. Power. Women. A thousand other lives paid taxes of blood to build his future.

  The Night Haunter was less feared because of the boy’s escape. He was vulnerable. Death could be cheated. As fear lessened, his task became harder. By the time the man the boy had become was tracked down to his lair, many innocents had perished.

  ‘You made me,’ said the older boy, in both visions, both as an apostle of a gentler age and devil of its worsening hell. ‘You made me,’ said the grown man, through strangulation and through grateful tears, whether the same pale hands choked his throat or caressed his face.

  There can only ever be one future, thought the Night Haunter. Only ever one.

  The kinder fate dimmed, obscured and extinguished by the darker. If, for a moment, the Night Haunter had stopped to turn these sights about in his mind, he might have apprehended the truth of choice – that both futures were valid, and favoured eventuality could be coaxed into being. But his sight was dark indeed. He saw only the need for immediate retribution.

  Night Haunter’s eyelids flickered. His eyes rolled in their sockets, flicking from black to white and back. He let out a piteous moan. The boy pushed himself backwards along the rooftop, then got up, and tentatively approached. Why he did so was beyond Night Haunter’s understanding. It would have been better to flee. Two possibilities flickered with migraine intensity. Would the boy aid him, or would he strike? There could only be a single outcome, and Night Haunter gave one no credence at all.

  Fate could not be allowed to make mistakes.

  Night Haunter’s hand struck, serpent fast, seizing the boy by the throat. The boy’s eyes bulged in panic, yet almost as suddenly the fight went from him, and he accepted the sentence Night Haunter gave in his capacity as judge, jury and executioner.

  Night Haunter squeezed, his hand more effective than any noose. Bones went to powder with a small, wet crack. The boy’s eyes were already dulling as Night Haunter lowered him to the floor with obscene tenderness.

  For the first time, he looked at his victim, noting the gang marks plastered over his stunted body. Chronologically, the boy was probably some years older than the Night Haunter, but he was young, very young.

  Age did not matter. Guilt did.

  ‘Justice,’ he whispered.

  There was work to be done, a message to be written in mutilated flesh. Thin lips bent to a face doomed never to grow old, puckered as if for a kiss. Night Haunter sucked the eyes out first, to see what the boy had seen, he told himself, and not for the taste of the warm jelly inside.

  He feasted hungrily. Fragments of the boy’s past coursed through his memory, torn from the molecular machinery of his cooling body by Night Haunter’s strange gifts. Where Karzen had hidden to sleep, who his people were, where his gang mates could be found. The Night Haunter gleaned much information this way. Many new judgements were born in that instant. Sentences of death were passed on a score of sinners who, unaware that the end was coming for them, went about their last few hours ignorant of fear. Their deaths would be regrettable, Curze told himself, while anticipating them eagerly; inevitable, necessary sacrifices to raise mankind up from its animal habits.

  Curze had no faith in humanity. He saw, but did not process, the knife lying some metres away, fallen from its sheath, far too far for the boy to have grabbed it, and he did not remember what could have been.

  There could be only one future, one road to civilisation. Cobbles of bone paved it. Rains of blood washed it. Peace lay at the end.

  Justice dictated it be so.

  ‘You see? You see!’ accused Konrad Curze, waggling bloody fingers at the corpse-father. ‘You do, don’t you! Humanity can only be pushed into civilisation by great men. You relied upon a better nature that did not exist. I am better than you because I saw that clearly, without your naivety.’ He covered a smirk with his hand. ‘And they say I am mad! Did I take an improbable title to myself? No!’ he said. He ticked the point off a gore-hung finger. ‘Did I seek to subjugate all of the human species to my will? No. Did I command the genocide of entire races, burn civilisations, destroy worlds full of life to fulfil my dreams? No, no, and no!’ He screamed the last, then recoiled from possible retribution.

  Silence. Cold. Dark.

  Receiving no punishment, he became sly. ‘I killed, tortured, and hurt. This is true, but only ever a portion of those I encountered. Only ever enough to make the dull herds stop, and rethink, and let their knives sleep in their sheaths. I told them the truth. I said to them, stop the bloodshed, and I will stop mine. I said, listen to the fear in your hearts, and those that remain will be spared. Whereas you, you tricky, wicked, devious father, you sold a lie of golden futures, until the mirror cracked, and all the darkness concealed beneath poured out. A lie, I suppose, is a small crime, if it is small. But the lies you told! Oh the lies!’ He held up his hands, blood wet and black. ‘The enormity of them! The audacity! Not one of the atrocities I have committed can possibly compare to a lie of that scale. Every dead child, every society burned, every species I chased from life into history to please you… What are these crimes compared to the truth you kept from us?’

  He huddled lower, wrapping his feathered cloak about himself, as if the cold had finally seeped deep enough within his skin to bother him.

  ‘I was justice, as you made me. I bought billions of lives with the pain of a few million where my brothers slaughtered, and bombed, and slew. And yet I am the monster. I was the thing in the night, despised as much as feared, while they were your shining paladins. Great Horus! Glorius Fulgrim!’ He sniggered. ‘Their betrayal you either failed to see, or lied about to us all. And I know which it is.’ He stared into the eye-pits of the thing he had crafted. ‘You knew, you always knew.’

  Curze looked away and coughed, worked a nail in between a gap in his teeth to free the scrap of heart meat caught there, then chewed it thoughtfully. He inhaled sharply, a human sound of realisation.

  ‘I forgot! I forgot!’ he said brightly, his resentment quite forgotten. ‘I was telling you how I came to be here, on Tsagualsa. I stopped, didn’t I? How impolite. Let us continue.’

  FIVE

  THE FIFTH PASSENGER

  Elver’s dreams were never pretty. Thematically, they cleaved to bones, and blood, and rains of fire. Cities of embers where ash snowed from the sky in endless fall featured heavily. His nights were one long apocalypse. On the rare occasions his dreams were free of burning, he suffered Overton visiting his cabin with all his furies, to give out beatings for his insolence, or his youth, or whatever else Overto
n contrived to be offended by. The dreams were almost as bad as when he had come calling for real, back when Elver was young and incapable of fighting him off. On the even rarer occasions he was spared armageddon and the captain, he dreamed of home on his birth ship. To his reckoning, the last were the worst of all. Not for the dreams, which were pleasant, but for the crushing disappointment of waking.

  Unsurprisingly, Elver didn’t like to sleep. When he had to, as every human being must, he did so with a large degree of help. Much of Elver’s pathetic wages went on pharmaceuticals, narcotics if he could get them, with alcohol taking a distant but necessary third place. Knocking himself out was the only way for him to sleep. If he took nothing, he lay awake in his tiny berth dreading unconsciousness. He called this triumvirate of intoxicants his helpmates. In reality, he was a hopeless addict.

  Luckily for him, the Imperium’s vastness produced a bewildering range of drugs, and his existence as a chartist spacer gave him access to a happy fraction of contraband. Though the Sheldroon was restricted to five ports in two systems, this tiny slice of mankind’s realm was far more than most people ever got to see, and ripe with opportunities for desperate men.

  Elver considered himself a desperate man.

  The night they dragged the sarcophagus aboard Elver dreamed of dark corridors rank with sweat and ringing with screams. The drugs fractured the dreams into jigsaw fragments, all unpleasant, but far better than remembering them whole. The drugs made it hard to wake. Thanks to them, he slept through the beginning of the crisis.

  He came round to the breathless, short-interval blare of the Sheldroon’s general alarm. Someone in the corridor was pounding on the door with an insistence that suggested they weren’t going to go away any time soon.