Trez ran his fingertips over the Nostraman lettering, his fingers following the flow of inked words. ‘He told me, Jago. He tells me everything.’
Sevatar tilted his head, black eyes unblinking. ‘I have no secrets,’ he said again.
‘Then why do you hide from slumber, First Captain? Why do you force yourself to remain awake for weeks on end? Why – if you have no secrets – do you wake up with cold blood flowing through your pounding heart on the rare nights you surrender to sleep?’
Sevatar’s smile was as cold, and just as motionless, as the peeled-back rictus grins showing on the face of every chained corpse in the chamber. He said a single word, neither consciously weighted with threat, nor invested with any emotion at all. Just a single word, scarcely above a whisper, breathed through a dead man’s smile.
‘Careful.’
Trez had to look away. The tremble in his hands couldn’t entirely be blamed on arthritis, this time.
‘Sevatar…’ he said.
‘Ah, so now I’m Sevatar. Now, once you’ve pushed me to the point of losing my temper, you decide to show me an iota of respect.’ The captain stalked closer, his armour joints thrumming. Up close, the rumble of active power armour made Trez’s gums itch. Sevatar crouched by the seated old man, his black eyes forming pits in his pale face as he stared. ‘What has he told you, Trez? What did my father share with his little eater of dreams?’
The old man forced the words through quivering lips. ‘The truth.’
The First Captain’s grin returned – a liar’s smile, never reaching his dark eyes. ‘You think I won’t kill you, right here, right now?’
‘The primarch…’
‘The primarch lies dying aboard another ship. Even if he walked in here this very moment, do you think I care? You disgust me, old man.’ The Night Lord cupped the elder’s jaw in his gauntleted fingers. A single twist, a soft squeeze, and the archivist’s skull would shatter in the warrior’s grip. ‘The stink of your slow blood and worn skin… The fading rhythm of the ancient heart in your chest… And now, the spill of such dangerous words from these careless lips.’ Sevatar released the old man’s head. ‘You make it easy to hate you, Trez.’
‘I can help you. That’s why I wanted to speak with you. I can help you.’
Sevatar rose to his feet, already reaching for his helmet as he walked away. ‘I don’t need your help.’
Trez cleared his throat, his voice husked by doubt. ‘It isn’t working any more, is it? The training. The meditation. You can’t hold the pain inside the way you once could.’
He didn’t even look back. ‘You know nothing, human.’
‘You’re lying, Jago.’
Sevatar masked his white face beneath the skullish helm. Chiropteran wings rose from the helmet in a feral crest, cast in dark iron. His voice was a vox-altered snarl.
‘I am a son of the sunless world, and Eighth Legion to my core. Of course I’m lying, Trez. It’s what we do.’
Chapter III
Preparation
The pain came in a teasing touch, rolling against the back of his eyes in a throbbing tide. Just when he’d crest the dull ache and dare to hope it was receding for good this time, it pressed back with unwelcome insistence.
Sevatar wiped his dry, tired eyes with a thumb and fingertip. He didn’t need his helm’s retinal display to tell him he’d not slept in two weeks. He felt every hour of it.
‘Captain?’ asked a female voice.
He looked up from the hololithic tactical display playing out before his eyes, seeing a dark-haired woman in a rumpled flight-suit, carrying her visored helm under one arm. As he looked over at her, the sounds of the bridge came flooding back, breaking what remained of his fragile focus. He did his best to ignore the whispers, mutters, rattles and clanks of three hundred souls doing their duty.
‘Speak, Wing Commander Karenna.’
‘With respect, sir… you look like shit.’
‘That doesn’t sound like speaking with respect to me. What do you want, Taye?’
‘I have bad news, sir.’
Sevatar didn’t have to fake his smile. Bad news was one of the few things that never failed to amuse him.
‘Of course you do.’
‘The Blade in the Black just jumped in-system. Commodore Yul is aboard, alive and well.’
‘That makes him the new fleet admiral. Offer him my insincere congratulations on a rank he earned purely by being the last naval officer standing. But what’s the bad news?’
‘He voxed to inform me that Wing Commander Verith died in the ambush. The Void Condors were lost to a man. Do you want me to allocate the Blade a fighter squadron from one of the other ships?’
He waved the question away. ‘Ask the new admiral, that’s his game to play. My only order is that you and the Veiled Ones are to remain aboard the Nightfall.’
Karenna saluted in VIII Legion tradition, her hand in a loose claw, fingers touching her chest, above her heart – a sign of submission, offering the heart itself to a commander. Another gang custom, weaving its way down the years. On Nostramo, it had always meant a much more literal and visceral offer: to promise something so sincerely, the speaker would have their heart cut from their chest if they were found to be lying or incompetent.
‘Your trust in me and my men is very gratifying, captain.’
Sevatar was already looking back at the hololithic display, watching the simulation of viable warp routes out of the system.
‘Go away, Taye.’
‘Aye, sir.’
Watching her walk away, Sevatar finally abandoned the tactical projections.
‘You,’ he addressed a nearby servitor.
‘Yes,’ came its dead-voiced reply. The thing’s bionic eyes didn’t seem to focus on anything at all.
‘Record these projected flight paths. Disseminate them to the rest of the fleet.’
‘Compliance,’ said the slack-mouthed slave. Its amputated fingers ended in stubs, each one a key to be plugged into standardised Imperial terminals. The servitor unblinkingly slid its severed digits into the connection port with five separate tiny clicks.
Sevatar turned back to the primarch’s empty command throne. Before the ambush, Fleet Admiral Torun Keshr had occupied the place next to it, forever standing in calm control. Sevatar had never seen the man fazed, not even when he lay dying under wreckage, as the bridge burned around him.
‘Help me up, please,’ the old officer had said. Sevatar hadn’t even tried. The man’s legs were gone. The First Captain couldn’t see them through the smoke, not that it would’ve made a second’s difference if he could.
Sevatar pulled himself back to the present.
‘Summon Captains Ophion, Var Jahan, Krukesh, Tovac Tor, Naraka, and Alastor Rushal to the Nightfall,’ he said, uncaring of which officer carried out the order. ‘I will be in the primarch’s chambers, waiting for them.’
He walked from the strategium without another word.
‘Jago,’ the old man greeted him, as the bulkhead doors rolled open.
In a moment of rare expression beyond a false smile, Sevatar looked genuinely confused. One eye narrowed in disbelief as he stared at the hunched old man at the desk, surrounded by decaying bodies hanging from the ceiling on rust-spoiled meathooks.
‘Do you ever leave these quarters?’
‘Rarely,’ Trez admitted. Sevatar’s arrival had distracted him from his writing. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘No more than usual. My brothers are gathering here this eve, little man. Be somewhere else.’
Trez repressed a shiver, wheezing into his rebreather. ‘Where should I go?’
‘An intriguing question. The answer is that I don’t care. Go anywhere that isn’t here.’
‘But Jago…’
Sevatar turned very, very slowly. Even helmetless, the j
oints in his armour’s neck purred unpleasantly as he turned his head to face the archivist.
‘Call me that,’ he said, ‘one more time.’
Trez looked at the First Captain of the VIII Legion, standing amidst an abattoir of hanging corpses, his face so unhealthily pale he might easily be hung on a flesh-hook himself. The chainglaive resting on one armoured shoulder was taller than the warrior who carried it.
‘Sevatar,’ Trez amended, quietly.
‘Better. Shouldn’t you be aboard the Excoriator, watching over the primarch’s dreams?’
‘Not now,’ replied the old man. ‘He isn’t dreaming as you would understand it. There’s nothing behind his closed eyes, nothing but the absolute dark.’
‘Fascinating. If you’re so devoted to staying, then at least keep quiet.’
‘I will. Thank you, Sevatar.’
Sevatar grunted an acknowledgement, and walked through the hanging corpses to where Trez worked at the primarch’s immense round table. The very edge of one side was taken up by the archivist’s parchments and data-slates. The rest of the circular slab played home to a mouldering cadaver. It looked like it had been pulled apart by a surgeon using no tools, nothing more than his bare hands. Gobbets of blackening meat were stuck to the table’s surface, cemented there by dried blood and bodily fluids.
Sevatar shook his head, reaching out to shove the corpse aside.
‘Don’t,’ Trez said. ‘Don’t, Sevatar.’
‘Why not?’ The warrior’s hand froze above the violated torso.
‘Lord Curze talks to them.’
‘So you said.’
‘No.’ Trez cleared his throat, though his voice still stayed phlegm-wet. ‘I mean, he speaks to them as they are. He knows when they’ve been moved, and it enrages him.’
Sevatar grabbed the body by its exposed spine and hauled it off the table. It lay sprawled on the decking after a dull thump.
‘We will deal with the primarch’s madness when he returns to us. If he returns to us.’ The captain keyed in a code on the interface now revealed, fingers tapping buttons crusted with gems of dry blood. Labouring hololithic generators flickered to life, beaming an image of the last display shown: the dead world of Tsagualsa, surrounded by its dense asteroid field.
Sevatar blanked the image, and called up a local void-scry. The fleet resolved, though blood on two of the projector modules stained parts of the hololith in swathes of red.
‘He wasn’t always this way.’
Trez looked up from his work again. ‘Pardon me?’
Sevatar hadn’t realised he’d spoken aloud. ‘The primarch. He wasn’t always this way. He had a vision of how best to bring worlds to compliance, and it was a vision we followed willingly. Now look at what he’s become. His private quarters are a reflection of the madness within. His own mind is eating him alive.’
Trez said nothing.
‘No comment, old man? No cunning retort, or words of wisdom? Are you not the being closest to our lord in all the great and grand galaxy?’
The archivist swallowed, breathing slowly into his rebreather. ‘He walks the same path as the rest of you, Sevatar. He is merely closer to the end of it. You’ll all be like him, one night.’
‘Not I. And don’t speak of him like he’s damned. There’s still nobility in him. Still strength.’
‘Oh, I know that.’ Trez gestured to the bodies. ‘He is not always this bad. He had a… difficult few months, before the ambush. His dreams were bleak, poisoned by doubt. He knows when and how he’ll die, Sevatar. He’s always known. The knowledge pains him more than you or I could ever understand. The pressure of it, the inevitability, is a tide against his consciousness.’
Sevatar shook his head. ‘He told me the same thing once. Did he tell you when he believed the time would come?’
‘Yes, he did.’
Sevatar concealed his shock easily enough, though he’d not been expecting the primarch to ever share such a thing. ‘And is that time now?’
‘No.’
‘Then why is there still worry in your cataracted eyes, old man? If it is true, why has he suffered in this coma for two weeks, on the edge of death? If he’s destined to die months, years, centuries from now… why have our Apothecaries had to resuscitate him thirty-nine times? He cannot breathe without being plugged into machines that sustain his life by forcing his organs to function.’ Sevatar almost spat as he sneered the final words. ‘I do not believe in fate, or prophecy, or destiny. The primarch is a visionary and a genius, but even he can play the fool.’
Trez, wisely, said nothing. The door rolled open again, mere seconds later. A warrior in a skull-faced helm stood in the opening, his helmet showing the same flared, winged crest as Sevatar’s. Chains decorated his armour, a skull bound to each one – some alien, most human.
‘Sev,’ the newcomer greeted him, already walking into the chamber.
‘Tovac,’ Sevatar replied. They didn’t embrace, or grip wrists in the fashion of closer brothers in other Legions. They regarded one another a long moment, before Tovac Tor removed his helm.‘You look like you died and forgot to stop walking,’ Tovac said.
‘So I hear. How is your ship?’
‘Still a wreck, the piece of shit. It’s a wonder she’s still holding together after the beating the Angels gave her.’ Tovac looked around the room, his black eyes narrowing. ‘The 114th has had little reason to come aboard the flagship for a long time, Sev. I see the primarch has done some redecorating since I was last here.’
‘True enough. We’ll speak of it when the others arrive.’
Tovac nodded, and spared a glance for Trez. ‘Begone, rodent. Your betters are speaking.’
‘Leave him,’ Sevatar waved the matter aside. ‘Let him stay. He’s harmless.’
‘You’re getting soft, Sev.’
Sevatar mimed a theatrical bow. ‘I have no idea what you mean. I’ve always been the very soul of kindness.’
Tovac snorted, a smile curling one side of his lips. ‘It’s good to see you again, brother.’
Sevatar wasn’t quite sure how to reply; that sentiment always surprised him when others spoke it, nor did he understand why they said it so often. He said nothing of it, merely drawing the other captain’s attention to the runic display of ships in the spread of local space.
‘We have a third of the fleet gathered now. That’s better than I’d hoped.’
‘It’s a fine start.’
Sevatar wasn’t blind to the tension in Tovac’s black eyes. The other captain was Terran, but the gene-seed had changed him as it changed all of them.
‘Speak,’ Sevatar said. ‘I’d prefer the new Kyroptera not to begin by lying to one another and keeping secrets. It was a singularly inefficient way to lead a Legion.’
Tovac nodded. ‘I thought that’s why you summoned me. That’s what I wanted to ask, brother. I’m glad to be chosen. Proud, of course. But why choose me?’
‘Nepotism. Perhaps I just wished to choose the commanders from among the few friends I have.’
‘Sev. Please.’
Sevatar was still looking at the tactical display. Its luminescence painted his face in dappled blue light. ‘Because I trust you. And you’re an awful liar. I like that. The Pacification of Arvaya may have also affected my decision.’
Tovac grinned – a patently malicious baring of his teeth. None of the VIII Legion smiled with anything approaching grace.
‘The 114th enjoyed itself that night, let me tell you. Arvaya’s survivors are probably still weeping over the skinning pits.’
Sevatar’s reply was cut apart by the doors grinding open again. The newcomer entered more cautiously than Tovac, his helmed head turning between the other two captains. He paid no overt notice to the hanging bodies.
‘Captain Sevatar,’ he said. ‘Captain Tovac.’
�
��Captain Ophion.’
He took his name as a welcome, entering with his hands never far from his holstered weapons. Ophion was careful not to touch any of the corpses, stepping around them rather than shouldering them aside as Tovac had.
‘I confess, I have no idea why I was called to this council.’
‘I suspect that will be a recurring theme,’ Sevatar replied. ‘The others will be here soon. We have to plan the Legion’s future.’
Chapter IV
The Kyroptera
Var Jahan, Captain of the 27th Company. Born of Terra, as so many of the Legion were. An older warrior, famously cautious, more of a tactician than a murderer. He’d served the VIII Legion since the earliest days of the Great Crusade, when the Night Lords first took to the stars. Sevatar liked him immensely, but had no idea why.
Next was Naraka, Captain of the 13th Company. Naraka the Bloodless, his brothers called him, without the shadow of a smile. He earned the name during the compliance of Eight-Hundred-and-Nine Five, as the fifth conquest of the 809th Expeditionary Fleet. The 13th Company took an entire world without shedding a single drop of blood, through means few of the Legion’s other commanders had been allowed to know. When questioned on it, Naraka always refused to comment. His company swore an oath of secrecy, inviolate and unbroken in the many years since.
Sevatar knew what had happened. He liked that story.
After Naraka, there was Tovac Tor, Captain of the 114th. Tovac Lackhand entered the Legion at the same time as Sevatar; as children they’d run together in the same gang. He earned his epithet from a malformed birth, born with only one hand. Despite the deformity, he’d passed the physical trials to enter the VIII Legion, and immediately been fitted with an augmetic graft. It still didn’t behave as reliably as a natural limb – the Apothecaries had told Tovac that his malformed arm lacked a fully developed musculature, so his augmetic hand would always be a touch erratic.
Then, there was Ophion. As Captain of the 39th Company, he’d failed to distinguish himself beyond the base level of honour inherent in a century of solid, trustworthy service. All of his records – not that the VIII Legion was particularly meticulous in keeping them – spoke of a veteran Nostraman officer best-served by front-line duties, leading his men from the vanguard, and given only moderate responsibility in a wider campaign. And yet… Ophion had ordered his warship Shroud of Eventide to remain on-station, fighting the Dark Angels back from their ambush, aiding Sevatar and the Nightfall as he fought to buy time for the weaker ships to flee. So Ophion apparently wasn’t a thinker. Sevatar could live with that. In a Legion that considered tactical cowardice one of the finer and most amusing virtues, a rare sign of bravery was always worth investigating.
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