by Various
It overwhelmed vox channels and astropaths both, just as it had every other time. Sparks rained down from poorly repaired systems. The dim bridge lumens on the Umber Prince flickered. A burning wash of light rushed over the Night Lords’ hiding place – Skraivok’s lenses dimmed, and the armourglass portal dimmed further, but it was not enough. He shut his eyes. The light seared afterimages across his vision, and he did not see Klandr and Vost’s ships clawing their escape into the warp.
At least they had the decency to proceed to a safe distance beyond his own vessel.
‘And then there was one,’ he breathed. Only the Prince, and the dark ships bleeding their last into the void.
His eyes watered from the energy pulse. He lacked the energy to unclasp his helmet and wipe them dry. ‘Recall everyone. I want this ship ready to leave as soon as we have the engines back online. Send armsmen out to the other ships. Restock our vessel with full crew. We’re going it alone.’
‘My lord.’
‘And get me Kellendvar,’ said Skraivok.
Hrantax hesitated. ‘Nobody knows where he is, my lord.’
‘Why not?’
‘An error of judgement.’
‘You know,’ Skraivok jabbed an armoured finger at Hrantax, ‘if you weren’t the highest ranking officer left on this ship, I would kill you. You know that, right?’
‘I am certain of it, my lord.’
Damn him, thought Skraivok, for his impertinence. Damn him and Kellendvar both.
‘Just find the Headsman. Get him here now.’
Kellendvar pushed deeper into the man’s ruined face. The wretch gave out a moan of pain, as blood and gelatinous matter wept down his cheek. Kellendvar’s other hand gripped the man’s shoulder so tightly that his collar bone cracked.
Kellendvar looked him up and down. So weak, so fragile. ‘It is good that you stop struggling. You accept your fate. This is wise.’
‘Please, my lord... please...’ said the man, his voice a pained whisper. ‘I have served the Legion faithfully all my life.’
‘No doubt you think this is not fair?’ Kellendvar’s face was close to the man’s. He smelled blood, the humours of the ruptured eye, dirt and fear. He moved his finger just a fraction, the man gurgled in fresh agony. ‘It is not fair. But there is no fairness in all the universe. Do you not agree?’
The man’s only response was to choke out a phlegmy sob.
‘So tell me where my brother is, and I will give you a swift release from the sins of this life.’ Kellendvar’s tone made it absolutely certain what the alternative would be.
‘Which brother, my lord?’ gasped the man.
Kellendvar contrived to look puzzled. ‘My brother. I have only one.’
‘I have not seen any other legionaries since... since... Please, I beg you, release me!’
‘No. I already said – not a brother, my brother.’
The man screamed. ‘My lord, please! Please! He said he would flay me alive if we told!’
‘I do not think that is of much concern now, do you?’
‘Please, no more! He is in the Great Vault! Please, my lord!’
‘Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Be thankful, I will grant you mercy.’
Kellendvar pushed harder, hitting the back of the eye socket, which gave under the metal of his gauntlet like an eggshell. The man shuddered and died, his brains parting before Kellendvar’s thumb.
He dropped the serf to the floor, wiped his hand on the dead man’s roughly spun robes, and pulled him into the centre of the corridor. Unclamping the great axe he wore across his backpack, he set its energy field ablaze. A banging strike left a smoking gash in the deck plating and he plucked the man’s head free to regard it. Kellendvar searched about for somewhere to display it and pushed it onto a broken lumen bracket before striding off into the dark of the dead ship.
Old habits died hard.
The Nycton had been the largest ship in the fleeing rabble that had made the Sotha rendezvous. It had burst back into reality and barely managed to bring itself to a halt. The reactor flickered out not long afterwards, and the ship had descended into chaos. Elements of two companies, the Impossible Dawn and the Deepest Dark, had been present. Rivalry turned into outright warfare, and nigh on a hundred Night Lords were killed in the fighting before some semblance of order had been restored, and then only because of the subsequent arrival of other vessels at the rendezvous. The Nycton was subsequently abandoned to darkness, along with its surviving serf crewmen.
But it took a long time for a ship to truly die. The organs might fail, the brain go dark, but life lingered long in the corpse before every cell perished – the stranded survivors digested their host as bacteria in the gut slowly digested a dead man. The great artificial star at the vessel’s heart was extinguished, but power lingered still, running from auxiliary stations that would burn for a thousand years. There were many, many lesser machines that survived the death of the whole, enough to sustain a debased form of human life. Men and women might live on within the Nycton for generations, gradually forgetting about the galaxy outside.
Kellendvar heard the serfs rather than seeing them. Every so often, scuttling footsteps ran away from him, like rats in the walls. He made no attempt to go quietly, nor any attempt to pursue them.
‘I could catch you if I wanted to, little rats!’ he shouted. ‘You know it!’
His voice echoed through empty halls and chambers, chasing down distant corridors where there were only the dead to listen. He laughed, and walked on.
Whole areas of the ship were inaccessible, and Kellendvar was forced to backtrack many times. Only twice did he don his helmet and force his way out into the void; the immeasurable, dark expanse of the cosmos always made him feel something close to fear. He was a child of narrow alleyways. He had never enjoyed the sight of open space.
Within the hull, the air was laced with complex chemical aromas brought on by its burning. His neuroglottis processed it all, feeding him the delicious aftertaste of a thousand deaths. He walked corridors choked by blackened corpses, their twisted limbs and screaming faces carbonised into one, angular mass, so it appeared as though some multi-limbed monster had met its end there.
In the third concourse of the major throughway, he found the corpses of his battle-brothers, their armour cracked by each other’s mass reactive shells. He looked them over with disinterest, seeking any he knew, but the companies aboard the Nycton were not ones he had ever fought alongside. Their markings and kill-trophies were unfamiliar.
In one great atrium, ruptured pipes sent cascades of water, coolant and human waste rushing down. In some places the artificial gravity had gone, forcing him to plod along with ungainly mag-locked steps, while in others the cold of deep space seeped into the deck, coating metalwork and dead flesh alike in thin layers of frost.
He went aft, now more than two kilometres from where Skraivok’s salvage teams were hacking at the corpse of the Nycton like sea-scavengers devouring a whale. There, Kellendvar caught the scent of fresh blood.
Not long afterwards, he heard screams.
‘Kellenkir...’ he breathed. He shifted his grip upon his axe, and thereafter he went with greater care.
The serf had not been lying. Kellenkir had set up his lair in the heart of the Great Vault.
The relics of two centuries of warfare in the service of the Emperor had been smashed from their stands. Mildewed rags were all that remained of the banners of once-honoured enemies. Xenos weapons and skeletons were heaped in corners. Artefacts from dozens of scattered human civilisations lay broken upon the floor. Whether this was from deliberate vandalism or merely the punishment that the ship had sustained at the hands of the Dark Angels was immaterial – all sense of the Vault as a place of remembrance had been smashed by treachery either way.
It had become instead a place of horror.
Shackled bodies, all bearing signs of cruel torture, hung from every stanchion and pillar. The central aisle of the hall was lined by eyeless human heads. The air stank of excreta, blood, spoiled meat and burning flesh. Firebowls, torches and tallow-wicks of human fat gave the room a hellish light. What few windows remained unbroken were unshuttered, the view of the eerie, starless nightmare beyond bringing further menace to the vault.
Six crude cages lined one wall. Most were empty, but two were crammed with emaciated, filthy bodies. Chips of light glinting from their eyes betrayed the life that was still in them. Otherwise they were utterly still, resolutely staring away from the iron table at the centre of the room.
Chained to it was a serf in the last stages of death – male or female could not be discerned. Breath still bubbled from its lipless, eyeless face. The skin that had formerly clad it was folded with obscene decorum over an empty frame.
There Kellendvar saw his brother Kellenkir at work. He was as guilty as the next Night Lord of atrocity; true enough, he enjoyed it. But it was always to some end or other, not merely a pleasure in its own right. Such were the workings of his twisted morality.
What he saw in the Vault was simply gratuitous.
‘Brother,’ he called, softly.
Kellenkir answered without looking up from his work. He was naked, bloody to his elbows, the gore of his latest victim and the clean metal of his interface ports glittering in the firelight.
‘I heard you coming. You always were too heavy footed, Kellendvar.’
‘I have come to take you back. The Umber Prince is finally ready to depart. Time to put aside this idle torture and take up your weapons again.’
‘There is nothing idle about this. I teach these people a valuable lesson.’ He bent over, dug his fingers in between the ribs of his victim. It made a surprisingly loud crack, and Kellenkir’s unconscious plaything took two ragged breaths. Then, with a long, drawn out exhalation redolent of relief, the tortured soul slipped away into oblivion.
‘Skraivok is going to take your toys away regardless, brother. Come back with me.’
Kellenkir looked up. ‘Why? Has he killed his own?’
‘We were out of supplies. We were not sure if we would escape. Now, we need the crew. Leaving them here to fight for survival means we get only the strongest, and they’ll be pathetically grateful to be rescued.’
‘How very noble.’
‘How very practical, my brother,’ countered Kellendvar. ‘As the Thirteenth would say, at least.’ He walked to the table’s edge, his axe still at the ready.
‘We are no longer brothers.’ said Kellenkir. ‘This travesty of a fleet has fallen apart,’
‘You will always be my brother. You are my brother. We were born from the same mother, the same father. “Brother” is a word that means more to us than it does to the rest.’
‘Does it? What does blood mean, really? Nothing. Nothing is worth anything – not loyalty, and certainly not blood. Everything is worthless in the face of the night.’ Kellenvir grabbed the lolling head of the dead serf and, by brute force alone, wrenched it free of the neck.
‘Father would be so proud,’ said Kellendvar sarcastically.
‘Which one?’
‘Lord Curze. You killed our flesh-father.’
‘I did, didn’t I?’ Kellenkir smiled at the memory. ‘I remember so little from my time as a weakling. But I remember that.’
‘Come back with me. We will reave the stars together! Out there, that is where we should be, bringing terror to a thousand worlds!’
‘Oh yes? And how long will this dream last under a traitorous dog like Skraivok? Our Legion is no more. Those remaining are only the murder-gangs of dead Nostramo born again. We are not an army. We’re returning to type, hiding in the shadows. We’ll be at each others’ throats again before long. A man can only ever be the man he is, transhuman or not. We were fools to believe that it could be different, Kellendvar. The other Legions are right to hate us.’
Kellenkir tossed the head aside. It landed with a wet thump.
‘There is no civilisation, no justice. Only pain and deprivation. And suffering, and the blessed end of suffering. Surely this place is proof of that, if proof were ever needed. Why fight it? I will remain here, and bring an end to suffering and sin.’
Kellendvar shook his head.
‘Not all of the Legion is accounted for. We can rejoin the others, and fight on.’ He lowered his guard a little, to show his sincerity, but only a little. He knew that Kellenkir was one of the few who could best him in single combat. ‘Please, brother.’
‘Who is Skraivok to think it’ll be any better in the rest of the Legion? The Night Haunter is dead. There is no way he could have survived the Lion.’
‘We don’t know that brother.’
‘He nearly killed him the first time. The Lion is not one to leave a job unfinished.’
Kellendvar’s face contorted. This wasn’t going as planned. His brother was always contrary, but never so awkward. ‘We’re all we have, you and I. It’s always been different for us. We’re not like the others. Even amidst all this, we have that.’
‘Nobody has anything. Nothing has value.’ Kellenkir held up a pendant on a length of chain. ‘Have you seen one of these before?’
‘No,’ said Kellendvar. ‘Should I have?’
Kellenkir chuckled, and the serfs in the cage gibbered in terror at the sound. ‘No, I think the likes of us not seeing it is entirely the point.’ He tossed it over to his brother, who caught it in his hand.
The chain was sticky with blood. Kellendvar held it up. ‘An aquila?’
‘I’ve found a few of them wearing these as amulets,’ explained Kellenkir. ‘And on deck fifty-two, I found a whole lot of them together. They’d killed themselves. There was a bigger one of those mounted on the wall.’
‘So?’
‘So? You always were the stupid one, Kellendvar. It was a congregation, a temple. They’re worshipping the Emperor. Hoping he’ll come and rescue them. Imagine that! Imagine it sinking into their fragile little skulls that there will never be any settlement dues, no shift rotations, no alternative duties, pay or rights like some of the Legions offer. Just endless servitude in the belly of an Eighth Legion starship, and most likely a painful death at the end. This is our war, not theirs. So they turn to the Emperor as a god. The Imperial Truth!’ he scoffed. ‘How quickly they abandon it for a taste of hope.’
Kellenkir turned to the captured serfs.
‘Hope is an illusion, life is pain!’ he bellowed. ‘And I intend to perfect its art.’ He went over to the cages and pointed at one cowering wretch. The man fell to his knees, pleading – not for life, but for a clean end. With a cruel smile, Kellenkir shook his head, and swung his digit around to indicate another. ‘You.’
He reached in with one hand and grabbed the second serf in a crushing grip. The man screamed like a child caught by a monster. The others did nothing to help, but shrank away from this angel who had become an ogre.
‘I was afraid you would say that, brother,’ Kellendvar sighed. ‘But you are wrong.’ He ran at his brother without warning, tackling him high. Kellenkir dropped the serf, who crawled away on his belly, weeping, and the legionary’s face twisted with fury. He grappled with his brother, and both fell to the floor.
‘How dare you!’ He scrambled onto Kellendvar’s armoured shoulders, squatting on his chest, pinning his arms to the floor. He smashed his brother four times in the face, each blow like a falling anvil. ‘You are wrong! You are wrong! No one is coming! It will all end in darkness. It is the only way that anything ever ends!’
Kellendvar bucked under his sibling. Kellenkir was the stronger – he always had been – but he did not have the added strength of his armour. Kellendvar twisted, sending his brother sprawling, before rolling smoothly to his feet with his bolt pistol aim
ed at Kellenkir.
Something caught his eye in that moment. Through the windows, out in the void.
The glimmering precursor of an incoming warp translation.
Kellendvar spat blood from his mouth. ‘Then brother, look, and see that I am not wrong.’
Kellenkir’s narrow eyes flickered warily to the view. A tear appeared in reality, vomiting bright colours into the shadow of Sotha. Tendrils of semi-sentient light writhed out as a battlefleet emerged from the empyrean, psychic backwash boiling from its Geller fields.
A Night Lords fleet.
The Nycton rocked in the warp-wake of the vessels coming in, pitching them both from their feet. Kellendvar recovered first. He dived at his sibling, a pain-spike in his hand. He jammed it into his brother’s chest interface port. Devised to render a Space Marine immobile, its discharge blasted directly through Kellenkir’s nervous system.
‘One day, little brother, I will kill you,’ Kellenkir managed to slur, before collapsing with a thunderous crash.
Kellendvar holstered his pistol and locked his long axe to his backpack. ‘Maybe. But I am saving you first,’ he muttered.
He picked Kellenkir up under the arms, and began the long process of dragging him back to the salvage area.
In their cages, the serfs wept.
Krukesh the Pale, 103rd Captain, a lord of the new Kyroptera, strode onto the command deck of the Umber Prince, twenty of his warriors filing in close order around him. Only when he reached the waiting Skraivok and Kellendvar did the bodyguard part ways, and then he stepped forwards. He had his helm in the crook of his arm, exposing his pallid, corpse-like face.
He looked around the bridge with eyes blacker than jet, an expression of mild amusement on his face. ‘Well, Skraivok – you have made quite the mess of this ship, have you not?’
‘Only because we did not run quite as quickly as you,’ said Skraivok, who was painfully aware of the large number of fully operational vessels now crowding his limited view outside.
‘Ah, ah, ah!’ Krukesh wagged a finger. ‘I am Kyroptera! I have gathered much of our scattered forces into something approaching a fighting Legion once more, and am here, it appears, to rescue you from this little hole you find yourself in. A little more respect is due me, Claw-master.’