Was this what it was to be a primarch? To laugh at wounds that would destroy even an Astartes? To feel war as an amusing diversion, while crushing a million enemies under the might of invincible armies?
Perhaps this was what the Night Haunter had felt. This exaltation. Blood-slick claws tore fresh rents in his cheek as he scratched himself, laughing at the delicious pain. Pain itself became a joke to those who could never die.
“Prince Talos,” his troops were shouting up at him. “Prince Talos.”
No, not shouting. Worshipping. They bowed and cried and prayed for his attention. This…
“…is wrong,” Talos growled. The Night Haunter was never exalted above us as a perfect, immortal being. He was moribund and cursed, stronger for all the trials and agonies he endured.
“This,” he finished, turning from Slaa Neth, “is not how he lived. It is not how I will live, either.”
“Cyrion,” the figure smiled. Talos hadn’t ever smiled like that in his life.
“What of him?” the Astartes narrowed his black eyes, instinctively reaching for weapons that weren’t there.
“His soul has felt my caress. Your brother hears the fears of every living thing. My gift to him.”
“He resists.”
“On the surface, he resists. The parts of his mind that shout silently relish the sounds of weeping souls. He feeds on fear. He enjoys what he senses.”
“You are lying,” Talos said, but his broken conviction was evident in the growl. “Begone.”
The first figure faded with a laugh, unseen by Talos, who now stared at the second. He wasn’t surprised to see another image of a Night Lord, his own armour facing him once more. Talos felt a smile creeping across his lips at the sight: it was his armour laid bare, the cannibalism and repairs left unpainted and visible to the naked eye. His chestplate was still the deep blue of the Ultramarines. The armour of his leg was the royal yellow of the Imperial Fists, and the thigh guard attached was the gunmetal grey of the crippled Steel Confessors Chapter. A harlequin’s display of colours and allegiances made up the figure’s war-plate, and Talos lost himself in the memories of where and when each piece was taken. Most, he’d not even thought about for years. Decades, even.
The shoulder guard ripped from the corpse of a Crimson Fists veteran was a particularly pleasant recollection. They’d fought hand to hand, an uncomplicated brawl of fury against fury, gauntlets pounding cracks in each other’s armour until Talos had managed to crush the other warrior’s windpipe. Once the loyalist Astartes was strangled into unconsciousness, Talos had broken his spine and smashed his skull open against the hull of First Claw’s waiting Land Raider. With the Crimson Fist finally dead, the Night Lord let the body fall to the ground.
Strange, how the centuries were affecting his memory. He’d believed once that his recollection was almost eidetic. Now, he realised he’d forgotten the most ferocious three minutes of fighting in his entire life.
The second figure removed his helm, showing a face that mirrored his own but for the curving symbol tattooed on its pale cheek.
“You know me,” the second figure said, and it was right, Talos did know. He recognised the faintly patronising cadence in the man’s speech, and the sickly sweet scent rising from his armour. The same smell emanated from the Exalted.
“You are the Shaper of Fate,” Talos said. “Vandred is one of your slaves.”
The figure nodded, his black eyes a perfect image of Talos’ own. “He is one of mine. A champion of my cause, a beneficiary of my gifts. Not a slave. His will is his own.”
“I believe differently.”
“Believe what you will. He is of some value to me. You, however, could be so much more.”
“I have no interest in…”
…power.
That was the first sensation that drummed from his twin hearts, as though they pushed strength itself through his body with each dual beat. This was not the laughable power of blithe immortality and pleasure, but something altogether more familiar. He turned his head to regard the others on the command deck.
The Atramentar, all eight of them, knelt before him. Beyond them, the bridge crew worked their stations; each and every one a human with a servitor aide, all working diligently.
He gestured to the Terminators abasing themselves before him. “Rise.”
They rose, taking their places flanking his throne.
As clear as the sound of his own breathing within his battle helm, as real as his own red-bathed sight, he felt the sudden surety that one of the Atramentar would speak. It would be about the Exalted’s punishment.
“Lord,” growled Abraxis, the Atramentar warrior closest to the throne. “The Exalted awaits your judgement.”
He knew then, before he even spoke, that the Exalted would break under thirty-eight night cycles of physical and psychic torture. The Atramentar could provide the former. Talos himself would provide the latter.
“Mark my words, brothers,” Talos said. “He will not last forty nights under our care.”
The eight Terminators nodded, knowing he spoke the truth, knowing he had foreseen it in the winds of fate.
“We are one hour from our destination, lord,” said one of the mortal bridge officers. Talos closed his eyes, and smiled at the images he saw imprinted in his mind.
“When we re-enter realspace, seek the engine signatures of three freighters using the third moon as shield against auspex returns. Cripple them quickly, and ready First, Second and Third Claws for boarding actions!”
The whispers began. They thought he couldn’t hear them—the whispers about his new power, about 10th Company’s resurging strength. Let them praise him in whispers. He needed no obsequiousness to his face.
Talos relaxed into the command throne, letting his thoughts drift into the infinity of what was yet to come, feeling the skeins of fate like a thousand threads under his fingertips. Each strand led to a possible future that played out before his eyes, if he merely concentrated for a single moment. The future…
“…is unwritten.” He took a breath, feeling naked without his armour and swallowing the rising urge to slay these apparitions before him. “I am a seer, and I know the path of the future is darkened by choices yet unmade.”
His reflection, in its salvaged armour, shook its head. “I can offer you the secret sight any mortal must have in order to pierce the mists.”
“My second sight is pure.” Talos spat on the chestplate of the patchwork armour, where—much to his discomfort—the Imperial eagle still shone undefiled. “Yours is the bane of sanity. Leave.”
He turned to the third, aware of a buzzing sound that felt almost tactile, crawling against his skin. Flies covered the armour of the third figure, fat and blood-red, though patches of occasional blue showed through the insect vermin as they swarmed over the armour’s surface in a rippling, random tide.
The figure wore no helm. The face was his own, blighted by swollen sores and infected cuts. Through cracked lips which bled a thin orange fluid, the figure shook its head, and spoke with the voice of a grunting, drowning beast.
“I was summoned here,” it said, “but you will never be one of my champions. I have no use for you, and you have no will to wield the power I offer.”
Talos fixed on the first point of cohesion in all this foolish madness. “Who summoned you?”
“One of your kind wove his pleas into unspace for a flicker of my attention. A magus, begging into the warp.”
“An Astartes? A Night Lord? A human?” The figure faded, taking its rank stench into oblivion as it went.
“Who summoned you?” Talos cried into the darkness.
When silence was the only reply, he turned to the fourth and final figure, the act of facing it bringing it into being.
The last figure showed the greatest deviation from Talos’ own image, and that alone set the Night Lord’s lip into a disrespectful sneer. This figure, unlike the others, was in motion as if unable to remain still. It swayed from foot to foot, hunche
d over akin to a beast ready to leap, breathing rasping from its helmet’s vox speakers.
The armour itself was red, the red of a body’s darkest blood, edged in bronze so filthy it looked as dull and worthless as copper. It was still his armour, but lacking his familiar trophies and sporting fresh battle damage, as well as the repainted surfaces and bronze modifications, made it an unnerving sight. Seeing his most treasured possession so twisted…
“Make this good,” he said, teeth clenched.
The figure reached up, removing its helm with shaking hands. The face it revealed was a mess of scars, burns and bionics, framing a malevolent grin.
“I am Kharnath,” it grunted through the toothy smile.
“I know that name.”
“Yes. Your brother Uzas cries it as he takes skulls for my throne.”
“He is one of your slaves?” Talos couldn’t tear his eyes from seeing his own face so damaged. Half of the head was replaced by oil-smeared bionic plating that fused with raw, inflamed skin at the edges. The flesh that remained was blistered and uneven from burn scarring, or darkened by badly-sealed cuts from what must have been horrendous blows to offset the enhanced healing of Astartes physiology.
Most unnerving of all was the way he swayed, hunched over and ape-like, with the same dead-eyed grin Uzas wore when trying to maintain his attention on a difficult conversation.
“Blood,” it wheezed, “and souls. Blood for the Blood God. Souls for the Soul Eater.”
“Is Uzas your slave? Answer me.”
“Not yet. Soon. Soon he will stand as a champion among my warriors. But not now. Not yet.”
“Whoever summoned you to win me to your allegiance has wasted their time. This is almost laughable.”
“Time is short,” the figure still grinned. “And such sights I have to show you.”
Talos had more insults to offer, more rejections to voice, but found he couldn’t speak. His lungs locked, feeling like slabs of quivering stone behind his fused ribs. It was a savage echo of the moment he’d been poisoned, and he felt the same sensation as the meat within his body shuddered, stealing his breath. This time, as he fell to his knees, his breathless wheezes weren’t curses, but laughter.
The warrior of blood was fading. Talos knew in the world of flesh, his lungs were purging the taint that brought him here.
“Witness my gifts,” Kharnath said, desperate now, ferocious in his eagerness. “See the strength I offer. Do not abandon this one chance!”
“Go back to hell,” the Night Lord grinned through bloody teeth, and vomited black mist into the nothingness.
Talos opened his eyes again.
Immediately, he felt vulnerable. He was on his back. Prone.
Filtered through the red of his visor display, he recognised the scarred ceiling of the mess hall, and his targeting reticule marked three figures standing above him. He did not know who they were or what their presence indicated—all three were mortals in dark robes marked by blasphemous symbols, backing away as soon as his consciousness returned.
“Preysight,” he said, and their vague identities were further masked, reduced to the rich blur of thermal traces.
The first died as Talos rose to his feet and pounded his fist into the human’s face. The Night Lord felt the man’s head give with a wrenching snap of skull bone, and the corpse spun away without another sound. He was on the second robed figure before the first had hit the rabble-strewn ground, gauntlets clasped around the mortal’s frail neck, eliciting several wet clicks as he squeezed and twisted. The mortal’s eyes bulged as the sound of dry twigs snapping echoed into the air. Once the man’s head was wrenched backwards, after several seconds of teasing enjoyment, Talos let that body fall in turn.
The third figure was trying to escape, running for a set of double doors that led deeper into the prison complex. Three sprinted strides brought the Night Lord within reach, and he clawed at the fleeing heat-blur. The thermal smear screamed in his hands.
He wasn’t even hurting it, yet.
Talos lifted the smudged miasma of reds and yellows off the ground, and voided his preysight. A human face, male, middle-aged and weeping, met his natural vision.
“Going somewhere?” the Astartes growled through his vox speakers.
“Please,” the man wept, “please don’t kill me.” Through his helm’s olfactory receptors, Talos scented the cloying incense on the mortal’s robes, and the sour reek of his breath. He was infected with… something. Something within his body. A cancer, perhaps, eating at his lungs… Taint. He reeked of taint.
Talos let the man stare into the impassive skulled face of his helm for several more beats of his panicked, mortal heart. Let the fear build. The words of his gene-father, the teachings of the VIII Legion: Show the prey what the predator can do. Show that death is near. The prey will be in your thrall.
“Do you wish to join your friends in death?” he snapped, knowing his helm’s speakers turned the threat into a mechanical bark.
“No, please. Please. Please!”
Talos shivered involuntarily. Begging. He had always found begging particularly repulsive, even as a child in the street gangs of Atra Hive on Nostramo. To reveal that level of weakness to another being…
With a feral snarl, he pulled the man’s weeping, pleading face against the cold front of his helm. Tears glistened on the ceramite. Talos felt his armour’s machine-spirit roil at the new sensation, like a river serpent thrashing in deep silt. It woke again to feed on the mortal’s sorrow and fear.
“Tell me,” the Night Lord growled, “your master’s name.”
“R-Ruv—”
Talos snapped the mortal’s neck, and stalked from the room. Ruven.
Ruven resisted the urge to shrink before the Warmaster’s displeasure.
Abaddon’s claw scraped less than lovingly over the sorcerer’s shoulder guard, tearing the oath scroll that was bound there. Several strips of the hallowed parchment ghosted to the ground, floating patiently on the breath of an invisible wind.
“He has awakened early,” Abaddon repeated Ruven’s last words back to him.
“Yes, my Warmaster. And,”—he hated to add this—“he has slain my acolytes.”
Abaddon gurgled laughter through a fanged maw. “You were of the Night Lords before you came to my Legion, yet their actions surprise you now.”
Ruven inclined his helm with its lightning bolts painted onto the black ceramite. He was both intrigued and confused by the Warmaster’s rhetorical statement.
“Yes, my Warmaster.”
“That makes your carelessness doubly entertaining.”
Abaddon and Ruven stood on the ground floor of the prison complex, overseeing the ragged march of convicts towards the waiting slave ship that rested, slug-shaped and fattened for cargo capacity, on the dusty red plain beneath the prison mountain. Legion serfs, servitors and the hulking form of black-clad Astartes directed the column of convicts, occasionally serving out beatings or—in a few instances—executions, if a convict’s jubilation at freedom brought him to attempt an escape.
Robed acolytes, dressed identically to the humans Talos had slaughtered only minutes before, walked alongside the column, proselytising about the glory of the Warmaster, the false rule of the Golden Throne, the abominations done in the Emperor’s name by His armies, and the inevitability of the Imperium’s demise in the name of justice. Several of these priests shrieked at the thousands of prisoners in gibbering tongues unknown to all but the Dark Gods’ favoured servants, seeking any recognition within the convicts’ eyes, hoping to stumble across a Chaos-tainted individual and raise such a blessed scion of the Ruinous Powers out of the ragtag cannon fodder regiments of slaves being formed from the prison world’s population.
Solace would be stripped bare of life before the sun rose.
The sorcerer, Ruven, still said nothing.
“Your acolytes were worthless anyway,” Abaddon said. “Listen to these preachers, howling about the unworthiness of the Fa
lse Emperor. Such theatrics. And for what? Every soul upon this world was betrayed by the Imperium. Discarded, hated and forgotten—purely for the sin of living their lives as they chose. These men need no ideology beyond learning they will be given the chance to earn vengeance through bloodshed.”
“If my Warmaster does not approve of the methods of the acolytes I have trained—”
“Do I sound like I approve?”
“No, my Warmaster.”
“Cease scurrying, Ruven. Where is the Night Lord prophet now?”
Ruven closed his eyes, resting his gauntleted hand against the side of his helm as if trying to make out a sound in the distance.
“Making his way to the landing platform, my Warmaster.”
“Good.” The Astartes helms spiked by the Despoiler’s trophy racks clattered together as Abaddon turned to the sorcerer. “You were foolish to let your acolytes remain as long as they did.”
“I was, my Warmaster. Their chants were necessary to maintain the vision, but the prophet threw off the toxins quicker than I had anticipated.”
“Am I to assume he resisted your attempts at conversion?” Abaddon’s voice betrayed just how little faith he’d had in the idea from the beginning.
“He refused the Dark Ones, my Warmaster. To their faces. This was not some minor conjuration—I summoned reflections of the Four Powers. A trickle of power from the winds of the warp, each to offer their gifts.”
The blasphemous symbols branded onto Abaddon’s flesh burned and itched with maddening intensity. “What did he see? What was so easy to refuse?”
“I know not, my Warmaster. But his vision was true. I felt the presence of the Four. A momentary glance of their attention, if you will.”
Abaddon chuckled. The sound lacked even a shadow of humour. “Grotesque and unsubtle, but deeply amusing.”
“Yes, my Warmaster.”
“Return to orbit, Ruven. Your work here is done.”
The sorcerer hesitated, clutching his staff made from the fused bones of tyrannic-breed xenos. “Do you not wish to me intercept the Night Lord and make another attempt?”
[Night Lords 01] - Soul Hunter Page 16