by Various
Almost fifty officers were present – shipmasters, centurions, champions, all accompanied by their oathbound honour guards and personal attendants, bringing the total close to two hundred warriors standing beneath the banners of four battle companies.
Every Night Lord present was entitled to speak no matter his rank, which meant that skulls – used as tokens – were in plentiful supply. The oversized, elongated skulls of dead aliens were piled upon the table, each one scratched or painted with the curved runic lettering of the mellifluous Nostraman language. Here and there among the tokens of skinless bone lay exotic weapons and armour fragments of fallen human cultures, from kingdoms either brought to compliance by the VIII Legion, or rendered extinct by it.
Talos looked over the mournful mess taking up most of the central table in disorganised heaps. Whatever order prevailed when the Luna Wolves practised this tradition was absent in the Night Lords’ incarnation. Without a Space Marine’s eidetic memory, recalling which warrior had placed which relic would have been impossible.
The young Apothecary carried his helm beneath one arm, breathing in the warm, stale air that barely circulated through the cavernous chamber. A sweet reek nagged at his senses, something not far from spoiled food and a strangely musky spice. He found it cloying rather than unpleasant; one didn’t join the Night Lords Legion to fight their wars and train aboard their crypt-ships only to balk at the stench of decaying flesh.
Talos spared a brief glance for the hundreds of corpses hanging from the ceiling on industrial chains. Most were human or eldar, their armour cracked by bolts and rent by blades, many of them now little more than sinewy skeletons in broken carapace plate. Several were strung up by their wrists and necks; others by their ankles with their dead hands hanging down towards the gathered officers in beseeching silence. Many of the bodies were wrapped so utterly in binding chains that they hung as though cocooned by the hungry whims of some impossible metallic arachnid.
The Apothecary returned his dark gaze to the briefing. A hololith of the Night Lords armada dominated the air above the relic-strewn table, showing the fifteen vessels of varying classes that escorted the Covenant of Blood. Talos watched the warship, his home since leaving Nostramo so many years before, rendered in blue light and flickering as it sailed in formation. The lesser cruisers and escort frigates turned in a slow perimeter dance around their flagship, while the other three Night Lord warships kept close to the Covenant at the armada’s heart.
Talos had watched his home world die from the Covenant’s command deck.
He’d stood there with his closest brothers over two decades ago as the VIII Legion poured fire upon their own birth-world and pulled it apart with the anger of ten thousand guns.
It had been the last great gathering of the Night Lords. A bittersweet fact, at best.
Of all the eighteen Legions, few avoided their own brothers’ company with the tactful frequency of the VIII. It was said by many Imperial commanders that they didn’t work well with others, but the truth was a little more amusingly bleak.
The Night Lords scarcely worked well with each other.
Apothecary Talos blinked once, inhumanly languid, and turned iris-less eyes upon the figures around the table. Officers from all four companies comprising the 2,901st Expeditionary Fleet had been summoned to the emergency council. The gathering was limited to the warriors of the Legion. Their Imperial Army counterparts and the auxilia officers that had served faithfully – if uncomfortably – at their sides for the last several campaigns remained aboard their own vessels.
Beyond the ever-present thrum of so many suits of active power armour, the gathered warriors were silent and voiceless. No murmurs or whispers passed their lips. They waited, unnaturally quiet, not through discipline but through cold expectation.
Something was wrong. All of them felt it.
Chained skulls rattled against Malcharion’s war plate as the fleet lord keyed a command into the central table’s hololithic projectors. The fleet display sparked out of existence and another image crackled into audio-visual resolution above the pile of grisly tokens.
First Captain Jago Sevatarion, Praetor Nox of the VIII Legion, stood rendered in jagged light. His crested helm hung at his belt, while his spear, the weapon almost as renowned among the Legions as the warrior himself, rested across one shoulder. Two of his Atramentar warriors flanked him as motionless avatars, their lightning claws silent and still in deactivation. The pale faces of the warriors around Talos looked on, their white skin turned a consumptive blue by the ethereal light.
‘Brothers of the Eighth Legion,’ said the recording of Sevatar, his voice hissing with vox corruption. ‘Wherever you are in this hypocritical empire, whatever campaigns you are prosecuting in its name, our father demands that you join the Nightfall at once.’
Talos noted the vital signs of his squad elevating slightly on his narthecium gauntlet as the First Captain spoke once more.
‘The time has come. Make all speed to the Isstvan System.’
There was no order to the fleet’s dispersal. The warship Foresworn pulled away first, its engines running hot as it veered out of formation and began to breach the barrier from the material galaxy to the realm beyond the veil.
Alarms and klaxons wailed aboard the decks of those warships still sailing in cohesion, but by the time the perimeter vessels were rolling away from the fleeing Foresworn, it was already too late. The vile machinery at her core sent warp lightning coruscating over the vessel’s metal skin, and the Foresworn ripped into the great hole she’d torn open in reality.
The two closest escort destroyers, each crewed by several thousand humans, were dragged along helplessly in her wake. Great cyclones of ectoplasmic smoke, veined by lightning and seething with shrieking faces, clawed at the labouring, juddering vessels. These tendrils from the outreaching storm pulled them – unprepared and unprotected – into the warp behind the Foresworn.
Talos watched from the Covenant of Blood’s bridge. He leaned on the guardrail that surrounded the elevated central platform, where Malcharion’s command throne oversaw the workings of the whole deck. No expression marked his face as he witnessed the helpless ships tumbling into the warp’s tides, dragged to damnation as their engines failed to pull them free. He thought, briefly, of the thousands of men and women aboard the vessels, filling the corridors with screams as the boiling acid of unreality flooded through the unshielded decks.
A swift death, perhaps, but one that condensed an infinity of agonies into a soul’s last tortured seconds.
The Covenant of Blood began its own manoeuvres. The deck shuddered beneath his boots. Servitors locked into their stations on mono-programmed instinct, while the crew braced for entry into the Sea of Souls.
Calls for confirmation and explanation rang out from the rest of the fleet, sounding over the speakers set into the command deck’s ornate gothic ceiling. They fell silent at a curt gesture from Malcharion’s hand, as he sat with statuesque patience in his command throne.
Talos sensed one of his kindred drawing near from the thrum of live armour. He knew who it was without needing to look at the vicinity trackers on his narthecium. Telling squadmates apart by familiarity and instinct became second nature: they walked in different rhythms, their sweat had different tangs, they breathed with subtly different cadences. A Space Marine’s senses bathed his brain in information at all times.
‘Brother,’ said Vandred Anrathi, drawing alongside him.
‘Sergeant,’ Talos replied. He didn’t take his black eyes from the twisting, tumbling warships, now half-swallowed by incorporeal fire.
Sergeant Anrathi was a warrior of sleek, sculpted features, with the filed teeth of the night-worshipping tribes that had lived beyond the limits of Nostramo’s crime-choked cities. Despite his barbaric origins, his composure and self-control were envied by many; few warriors handled a Xiphon Interceptor with such ser
enity, or could oversee an orbital battle with the same tenacious precision.
He led Captain Malcharion’s command team and advised the commander on matters of void warfare. ‘Quite a sight, is it not?’ he asked.
Talos didn’t reply. There had been a time when the extinction taking place would have threaded strains of bleak fascination through his core. Even in the process of inflicting excruciation upon the Legion’s prisoners, there was a sense of righteousness in his actions. Agony and fear were meted out for a cause, for a purpose. Not by random chance.
But watching his home world burn and break apart had cooled his capacity to feel sympathy. In truth, he neither admired nor mourned the destruction now taking place before him. He felt little, in fact, beyond a vague sense of curiosity at whether the warp would one day vomit the stricken vessels back into real space, and what ruination they might have suffered in its tempestuous grip.
The deck gave a violent shudder at the cry of distant thunder. Broadsides, thought Talos. The Covenant of Blood was firing upon its own fleet.
That, at last, made him draw breath to question what was taking place.
‘Why?’ he asked, turning to meet his sergeant’s eyes.
Anrathi grinned more than most of his brothers. He did so now, bearing his elegantly filed teeth. He didn’t need to ask what the Apothecary was questioning.
‘Because I ordered it, and Captain Malcharion sanctioned it.’
‘Why?’ Talos repeated. Irritated curiosity narrowed his eyes. He wanted answers, not another of Anrathi’s dances around semantics.
‘If we kill them now,’ the sergeant replied, ‘we don’t need to kill them later.’
The medicae wasn’t fooled. Talos snorted, looking back at the wide, vast oculus screens, now showing the burning hulls of their escort vessels, dying in the black void between worlds, crumbling apart as they futilely sought to limp away. The Covenant had been born in the skies above sacred Mars and blessed with a host of weapons capable of levelling cities. The shieldless, trusting warships of its allies had no hope at all.
‘This is spite,’ Talos said at last. An ache was beginning to form at his temples, cobwebbing its unwelcome way through the meat of his mind. ‘We could cripple those we cannot convert. We could simply run, knowing they would never be able to keep pace, even if they learned of our destination. Instead we gun them down out of spite.’
Anrathi’s token shrug could have meant either confirmation or defiance. ‘Do you pity them, Talos?’
Do I? For a moment, for the barest breath, he did wonder. The boy he had been long before he stood in midnight clad with his brethren... that child might have stared in awed horror at what he saw. Before empathy, like sympathy, had eroded from the edges of his soul.
He found himself smiling at the idea.
‘You know I do not,’ said Talos.
‘Then why do I sense disapproval in your tone?’
‘My disgust is philosophical in nature. If we destroy out of spite, not from purpose or necessity, we lend credence to what the other Legions claim we are. Slaughter enough souls without true cause, and we would be the very monsters our cousins believe us to be. A self-fulfilling prophecy.’
Anrathi rested a gauntleted hand on the younger warrior’s shoulder guard. The skulls bound to Talos’ pauldron rattled against the ceramite as if whispering to one another in some muted, bony verse.
‘I can never tell if you are as naive as you present yourself to be, as deluded as you seem, or if you are simply laughing at all of us behind your eyes, Talos.’
The Apothecary looked back to the oculus screen, watching reality being ravaged by the arcane engines at the Covenant’s heart. A wound in space opened up before them, haemorrhaging wrathful antimatter in streaks of fiery lightning, ready to swallow the ship whole.
‘Perhaps the truth is somewhere between all three,’ he said at last. The pressure at his temples flared, a true migraine ache that leaked through his skull like searing fluid, feeling like an ugly premonition.
‘Are you well?’ Anrathi asked, his tone one of cautious surprise.
He knows, Talos thought. He senses it. Something in the Apothecary’s face had betrayed his sudden pain.
‘I have never killed another Legionary,’ said Talos. ‘That is all. I cannot help but wonder what it will feel like.’
‘Yet I have seen you kill many, brother. Witnessed the deeds with my own eyes.’
The Apothecary inclined his head, conceding the point. ‘Yes and no. Excruciation and execution are not quite the same as murder.’
The gunship Blackened was a crow of dirty blue and filthy bronze. Bodies of aliens and apostates were fused to the hull with half-melted adamantium chains, the corpses burned away to husks of charred bone upon atmospheric entry. Replacing them between missions was as sacred an act as the warriors of First Claw ever performed together. If no foes presented themselves, the Night Lords of Malcharion’s squad weren’t above crucifying members of their own human crew to serve in place.
Talos and his brothers stood in the dark as the gunship rocked around them. Each of them had abandoned the rearward restraint harnesses, choosing to stand in the forward bay for rapid deployment, holding onto the overhead handrails. Only the more cautious among them mag-locked their boots to the shaking deck.
‘Five minutes,’ said Captain Malcharion. ‘Helmets on.’
Talos lifted his helm into place, staining his senses in the red of his tactical display. Target cursors flickered and ammunition counts flashed. Nostraman runes scrolled down his eye lenses as he received his squad’s life signs and datafeeds. His armour’s systems greeted his immersion with squirts of adrenal chem-fire into the implants across his torso and down his spine.
‘First Claw, soul count,’ ordered Malcharion. The captain’s stern tones were raspy with vox breakage.
‘Talos, aye,’ the Apothecary replied at once.
‘Vandred, aye,’ said Sergeant Anrathi a moment later.
‘Ruven, aye.’
‘Xarl, aye.’
‘Cyrion, aye.’
‘Sar Zell, aye.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Malcharion voxed over the straining network. ‘Second Claw, soul count.’
And on it went as the other claws aboard other landing craft reported in. Talos watched each name-rune in the Tenth Company’s ranks briefly chime across his retinal display as their vital signs uplinked to his narthecium gauntlet.
‘Ninety-two souls,’ Talos voxed at the count’s completion. He turned to the captain at the squad’s lead. Malcharion was performing the final checks upon his double-barrelled bolter. ‘Tenth Company stands ready,’ Talos told him.
‘Viris colratha dath sethicara tesh dasovallian,’ Malcharion murmured in serpentine Nostraman. ‘Solruthis veh za jasz.’
Sons of our Father, stand in midnight clad. We bring the night.
There were no cheers, no solemn oaths, no roars of adrenaline-soaked readiness so common in other Legions. The Night Lords waited in the wake of their traditional words, staring into the darkness through primed target locks – some smiling, some dead-eyed, some silently baring their teeth in cannibal emotions that no mortal could know – all behind skull-marked faceplates.
The gunship heaved, almost dropping from the sky. Talos felt a split-second’s nausea before the gene-forged changes in his inner ears compensated. It triggered the pressure in his skull which had, until then, been dissipating.
‘Atmosphere breached,’ said Malcharion. ‘Three minutes.’
No going back, Talos thought. Though in truth they’d broken past the point of no return months ago. Perhaps even years, when they had burned Nostramo under the Night Haunter’s orders, to quell the poison seeping into the Legion from its own recruitment harvests.
Xarl was at the Apothecary’s side, holding the opposite handrail. His double-handed chains
word was bound across his back, and Talos saw the high crest atop his kinsman’s helmet, tall and proud.
‘Why are you wearing that?’ Talos voxed to his brother across the squad’s intra-link. ‘It will not be a parade ground down there.’
Xarl turned his bat-winged helm towards Talos, red eye lenses gleaming in the transport bay’s gloom. ‘Legion pride,’ came the reply in his husky, deep voice. ‘It feels right, given what we’re about to do.’
Cyrion, standing behind Xarl, had affixed his bolter’s chain-bayonet, and was testing it by live-cycling it with droning whines.
‘That crest is almost as high as Sevatar’s,’ he pointed out. ‘The enemy will mistake you for a hero.’
Xarl grunted. In dismissal or disgust, it added up to the same result. He turned back to face the front.
In the hull-shaking, iron-rattling unquiet that followed, Cyrion looked over his shoulder, where Ruven was distractedly watching lightning ripple across the naked blade of his force sword. It cast watery light across the gunship’s interior, ugly and fluid – it would have been just bright enough to hurt the warriors’ sensitive Nostraman eyes, had any of them stood unhelmed.
‘Will you be keeping to the precepts of the Nikaean Edict down there, brother?’
Ruven, Tenth Company’s attached Librarian, gave a charmless sneer. He sheathed the sword, plunging them into true darkness again, and said nothing.
Deprived of his favoured targets for baiting, Cyrion looked across the bay to Talos. Lightning bolts ran down the warrior’s faceplate, painted as elemental tear-trails. They glowed scarlet with the light from his eye lenses.
‘So,’ Cyrion said. ‘How are you?’
True to the Night Lords’ nature, the fight was anything but fair. They’d left the main battle in the Urgall Depression to the forward elements of Warmaster Horus’ forces. Malcharion had other plans, which First Captain Sevatar was only too pleased to grant his blessing.