The Night Haunter leaned forwards, his face touched by a sliver of light from the low-power illumination strips set in the ceiling. His gaunt features could’ve been sculpted from alabaster, no warmer to the touch, no more alive than stone.
‘Why are you here?’ one of the nobles asked. ‘What do you want?’ The Night Haunter could smell the coppery rancidity of fear on the man’s breath.
‘I could ask for this city, couldn’t I? But it is no longer yours to give. I’ve already taken it.’
He remained crouched atop the throne, clothed in rags and shadows. He could feel the effect his presence had on them – he could hear the trickle of fear-soiling in their clothing, hear the muffled thunder of speeding hearts, see the rise of the tiniest hairs on their necks.
‘It is my place to raise you above your savage natures. My place, as a creature above and beyond what you all are. I am this city’s sins, so the people may be sinless.’
The bravest of them spoke again, his black eyes unwavering despite the shiver in his fingers. ‘Is that your philosophy? All the murders and desecrations are fuelled by… this?’
‘By reason. By truth. I have learned how your hearts and minds function. With that lore, I brought peace to this culture.’
‘At the cost of freedom.’
The Night Haunter drew in a slow breath though his knife-slit smile. ‘Peace reigns, as I reign. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. You are a little man, with little dreams.’
‘You’ve ushered in the peace of the graveyard.’ The noble dared to take a step closer. ‘Peace, at the cost of surrendering all choice, all freedom. The city lives in terror, forced to live by the standards you place upon our shoulders.’
‘Yes,’ the Night Haunter replied. ‘Yes.’
‘But every sin–’
‘Is punished.’ The Night Haunter listened to their hearts beating blood through their bodies.
‘But punished by death, no matter the crime. No matter the scale of the sin. The people of the city live in silence, lest a single word earn them death for speaking out against you.’
‘Yes.’ The Night Haunter closed his dark eyes, as if listening to that very silence, drifting across the city. ‘Listen. Listen to the sound of raw silence. Is it not serene?’
The young lord shook his head. ‘How very noble of you, beast.’
‘Balthius.’ The Night Haunter turned the man’s own name into a whispered, caressing blade. ‘The potential I see in you is the reason you still live. Be silent, and you may yet continue to exist in the glory of my patience.’
‘You are a monster.’
‘No.’ The Night Haunter’s fingers curled into claws. ‘I am an emissary of civilisation. But to be the light in your darkness, I must cloak myself in sin.’
The intruder reached a hand to slowly claw his hair back from his sunken eyes. ‘Humans are animals. Beasts, to use Balthius’s own word. But they can be herded, controlled, ruled. The threat of punishment forces them to live by the code of law. Through fear, they rise above the bestial. I am on the edge of great things, my lords and ladies. Great things. I hold this city by the throat. Now, we have peace. We have serenity. Can you even understand the importance of that word? We stand on the edge of great wonders, if we use peace to fuel progress.’
He lifted his hand again, his long white fingers curling slowly together, a blossoming flower in insidious reverse. ‘But I want more. I want more from this city. More from its people. More from this world we call home. I want what’s mine by right, and mine by weight of responsibility to those beneath me.’
At last, the Night Haunter’s sneer faded. He looked at them all, his eyes so cold and hard they could’ve been opals dropped into the sockets of a bare skull.
‘I will be your king.’
Chapter VI
Memory
He didn’t hunt any more. The passing of years had stolen the need. His city was a silent hive, illuminated by the light of progress – and the more literal light of streetlamps and beacon towers. No crime, no sin, had been committed in decades. The last vestiges of anarchy and resistance had died out soon after he began to broadcast his mutilations across the city via the picter interfaces available in every home, transmitting his victims’ screaming over the planetary communications net.
Those executions, recorded in his throne room, ended what little crime remained. His people knew he’d take to the streets at the slightest provocation. In their fear, the last souls holding out finally accepted the salvation he offered them.
Nostramo Quintus, capital city of the sunless world, grew by the year.
Spaceflight was no mystery to them, albeit in the most stunted and warpless sense, reaching out to a handful of worlds in neighbouring star systems. Nostramo had traded its abundance of adamantium with these worlds for generations, though under the Night Haunter’s kingship, planetary exports rose to unparalleled levels, as did the profits of such endeavour. The city’s foundries and forge fires burned hotter, the refineries and processing plants spread across the urban sprawl, and the mines clawed ever deeper into Nostramo’s priceless crust.
After curfew, the city slept in absolute serenity. Each dawn, the workforce rose in the half-light of the dying sun, to repeat the cycle of labour again and again and again. It stank of industrial excess – that fiery reek of charcoal and chemical tangs. The people themselves stank of grey lives and bitter fear.
The Night Haunter stood on the balcony of the faceless grey spire he considered his castle, staring down at his city alongside the leering gargoyles shaped into the stonework.
Today would be the day. He knew it, as he knew all things. The answers came to him as they always did: in his dreams. Since mastering the world, he found his post-mortal senses sharpening beyond anything he’d imagined. He knew, on some voiceless level, he was becoming something. He was ripening, maturing, into… whatever he was born to be. It manifested first in knowing what people would say before they spoke, and soon became a habit of dreaming the events of most days on the nights before they happened.
Soon enough, he was dreaming while awake. What would happen began to overlay his vision of what was happening. He’d speak to an underling, losing track of the man’s voice, hearing instead the servant’s last words when he was destined to die from a heart failure in nine years. He’d see the faces of his governors, each one lined by years they’d not yet lived, carrying scars they hadn’t yet earned.
One dream stuck very fiercely indeed, burning brighter than all others.
‘Watch the skies,’ he’d ordered his district governors at the last conclave. ‘A fleet is coming. A fleet of such size, their engines will light the sky the way our sun never could.’
‘Will there be war?’ Balthius had asked.
‘Yes,’ the Night Haunter had replied. ‘But not with the arrivals. The war will come afterwards, far from Nostramo’s shores.’
‘Who are they?’ another governor had asked. ‘What do they want?’
‘They are my father’s warriors. He is coming for me.’
The city wept at the Delegation of Light. They wept collectively, every man, woman and child gathered on the streets, their pale faces staring at the strangers in their midst, as the sky was brightened by the false stars of void-ship engines.
The strangers walked in a slow, regal parade. The ground trembled, quite literally, with their rhythmic tread. They walked in great, grinding phalanxes, different formations wearing armour of black, of gold, of royal purple or earthen grey. Giants led them. Giants towering above their warriors, as their warriors towered above mortal men. Leading the giants was a sun incarnated in human skin; a god in a man’s flesh; his soul-fire uncontainable in a sheath of flesh and bone. Blindness was the reward for all who dared look upon him. Those afflicted spent the rest of their lives sightless but for the image of the living god flash-flamed into their dead retinas.
The people of Nostramo Quintus watched their city invaded by these marching off-worlders, millions upon millions of mouths locked silent, eyes wide with awe. The silence was so intense, so unnatural, it bordered on inhuman. Even the rain stopped. The storm season itself was holding its breath as the procession of outworld might reached the Night Haunter’s tower at the city’s heart.
He was waiting for them.
The army ceased as one, every single one of the
quarter-million soldiers standing motionless in the same moment. The four giants stepped forwards. The blazing god led them.
The first demigod, clad in wrought gold, inclined his white-haired head in majestic acknowledgement – a king greeting an equal.
‘I am Rogal Dorn,’ he said.
The Night Haunter said nothing. In his mind’s eye, he saw the giant die, dragged down by a hundred murderers in a dark tunnel, their knives and swords wet with the warrior’s blood.
The second giant wore armour of patterned grey, etched with ten thousand words, as if a scholar had taken a quill to a stone. He nodded his shaven, tattooed head, likewise inked with scripture – the lettering gold upon the tanned skin.
‘I am Lorgar Aurelian,’ he said, his voice a hymn where Dorn’s had been a measured, stately demand. ‘We have been seeking you, brother.’ There was sorrow in his otherwise kind eyes – sorrow at the dark city, its unhealthy people, the obviousness of their colourless, exhausting lives.
Again, the Night Haunter said nothing. He saw this warrior crowned in psychic fire, screaming up at a burning sky.
The third giant wore armour of riveted, dense black. His arms were solid silver, yet contoured and moving as living limbs. His voice was the steely grind of a foundry’s bowels.
‘I am Ferrus Manus,’ he said. His eyes were dark, but not cold.
The Night Haunter remained silent, seeing the warrior’s head clutched by its empty eye sockets in another man’s armoured fingers.
The last giant wore armour painted the violet of an alien sunset. His hair was silvery, long and elegant. He alone smiled, and he alone met the Night Haunter’s eyes with warmth in his own.
‘I am Fulgrim,’ said this last lord. ‘It is good to finally meet you, my brother.’
The Night Haunter still said nothing. He saw this final giant in only the faintest of images; always slithering and laughing, never entirely visible.
The god stepped forwards, his arms open wide. He drew breath to speak.
‘K–’
The first syllable struck the Night Haunter with the force of a spear through the heart. He went to his knees, gasping for breath that wouldn’t come, saliva stringing from his bared teeth. Blood ran from his burst heart, just as it gushed from his cut throat. His grasping hands had no hope of stemming the flow. His whole life rushed out in a liquid torrent, burning his cold fingers, images of murder hammering against the back of his eyes.
He felt a hand on his head. The pain died in a pulse, restoring his sanity in a moment of mercy. His throat wasn’t cut. His heart hadn’t burst. The Night Haunter looked up, to see the golden god – faceless and ageless – resolve into the image of a man. The man-god’s face could’ve been the face of any male on any one of a million worlds. It was all men, all at once. The apotheosis of Man.
‘Be at peace, Konrad Curze. I have arrived, and I intend to take you home.’
The Night Haunter reached up to rake his sweaty hair back from his gaunt features. ‘That is not my name, father. My people gave me a name, and I will bear it until my dying day.’
He rose to his feet, unwilling to kneel. ‘And I know full well what you intend for me.’
The scene froze around him. The Night Haunter looked at the Emperor – the godling claiming paternity over a coven of madmen and warlords – frozen in time. He looked at his brothers, at their Legions arranged in beautiful formation behind them.
He looked at the crowd, frozen in the same motionless pict-image perfection. Motes of dust glinted in the air, locked in the same spell as the people all around.
The Night Haunter turned, seeing a figure clad in ceramite the colour of clean midnight, the armour plates cracked by painted lightning. The warrior stood alone, watching in silence, his black eyes never judging, never accusing.
‘Sevatar,’ the Night Haunter said to the staring warrior. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’
Sevatar walked closer. His bootsteps echoed around the street, and his black eyes kept darting to the frozen crowds. He avoided glancing at the Emperor. Memory or not, he had no desire to feel his eyes fill with molten gold. The last time he’d looked upon the Emperor in the flesh, he’d endured seven weeks in the apothecarion while his vision healed. Impatience had driven him to the very edge of demanding augmetic eyes.
‘My lord,’ the First Captain said to his father.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ the primarch said again. He was Curze now, no longer simply the Night Haunter. He stood in midnight clad, in reflection of his son. His hands were barbed by the murderous scythe-length claws constructed for him in the laboratory-forges of distant Mars. ‘Tell me why you came.’
‘What kind of question is that?’ Sevatar leaned on his spear, the chainblade resting on the rockcrete road. ‘You are my primarch, father. Why wouldn’t I risk myself to save you?’
‘Because I am your primarch.’ Curze shook his head, his smile as dark as his deeds. ‘And I lead a Legion of foul-hearted wretches with no sense of loyalty to me, or to each other.’
Sevatar shrugged, with a grind of armour joints. ‘And yet, I am so very popular among my brothers. The mystery of it all fascinates me.’ He looked around the road again. ‘Why do you dwell on these moments, lord? What calls you back to the past, when the future is still threatened?’
Curze didn’t answer. He beckoned Sevatar to follow, and began to walk down the street, weaving between the statue-warriors of the Emperor’s Children.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ the primarch said again. ‘Not because this is private to me. I don’t care about that, Sev.’
‘Then why not?’
‘You know why not.’ Curze chuckled, the sound no different from a lizard choking on dust. ‘In a single night, you’ve undone decades of suppressing your talent.’ Curze looked back over his shoulder, at his son following close behind. ‘Your psyche is no longer guarded. I can read you, in a way I’ve not been able to do for years. I can see through your barriers, for they are no longer barriers at all.’
Sevatar knew what this was building up to. ‘I don’t want to know.’
‘Yes, you do. Everyone does.’ Curze looked ahead again, turning to move between an isolated phalanx of Ultramarines, led by their stoic commander.
‘I asked you not to tell me back then, sire.’ Sevatar followed, his face darkening. ‘Please keep to our former agreement.’
‘No.’ Curze gave his dusty chuckle again, wind rasping through a tomb. ‘You die in battle.’
Sevatar swallowed. ‘That’s hardly surprising, lord. I’ve no desire to know the rest.’
‘You’re safe, Sev. I see little beyond that obvious truth.’
Sevatar followed in silence for another minute. ‘You are making me regret doing this. I’d hoped to find you, and…’ He let the words hang, unsure he wanted to finish that sentence.
‘And?’ the primarch prompted.
‘And save you, sire.’
‘That’s why I enjoy your company so much, Sevatar. You tell the driest jests.’
Sevatar scowled. ‘I’ve gathered a third of the Legion, Lord Curze.’ He spoke as he always did when officially reporting to his liege lord – in a clipped, clear tone. ‘The Kyroptera stand ready once more. I intend to scatter the fleet, leading the bulk of our forces to Terra. The rest will dissolve into the void, harassing Imperial supply lines, burning worlds, carving fresh skinning pits
at the heart of cities. Just like the old days.’
Curze looked back over his shoulder. His teeth were filed now, scored down into tiny ivory daggers, just as they were in the waking world.
‘You say “Imperial” as if we aren’t Imperial ourselves.’
Sevatar nodded to that. ‘I’m not sure we are any more, sire.’ He trailed after his primarch for another few minutes, moving between more warriors in the royal purple of the Emperor’s Children. ‘Trez is with me. I can hear him, feel him, in the back of my mind. He’s helping me be here. I’m not sure how.’
‘He is a good man,’ Curze spoke quietly. ‘At least, as good as one is likely to find in our fleet. We are none of us good men, are we?’
‘We do what’s necessary, sire.’ Sevatar passed an Emperor’s Children captain whose armour inscriptions he recognised. He briefly considered trying to kill the warrior here, in his primarch’s memory. If the notion had even a remote chance of success, he’d have done it without compunction.
After passing through the III Legion’s ranks, they started moving their way through the dark, ironclad formations of the X Legion. Sevatar found himself absently glancing here and there for the insignia of warriors he’d killed on Isstvan.
‘Lord?’ he asked after several silent minutes had gone by.
‘Speak, Sev.’
‘Why do you hate us?’ He asked it quietly, carefully, with no hint of offence or malice. The words still stopped Curze in his tracks, causing him to turn. The long blades curving from each of the primarch’s knuckles reflected the golden light of the Emperor’s halo, several streets away.
‘What?’
Sevatar spoke just as casually as before. ‘Why are you the only primarch to hate his own Legion? What have we done to you?’
Curze smiled, barely. ‘I spoke with Angron and Lorgar, not long ago. They told me of their purges, cleansing the untrustworthy elements from the Twelfth and Seventeeth. I laughed when they said it, at the sheer absurdity of the idea. They knew exactly when to stop the killing of the weak, the treacherous and the corrupt within their bloodlines. I wouldn’t even know where to begin culling mine.’
Shadows of Treachery Page 28