[Night Lords 01] - Soul Hunter

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

  Cyrion held his arm out as a servitor attached his vambrace and gauntlet. Everyone in the room caught a glimpse of the new augmetic limb, its metal surface a dull, oceanic grey, still uncovered by synth-flesh. Soon enough, the naked steel and titanium arm was armoured in the midnight blue of his battle plate.

  Weapons were blessed and honoured. Oaths were sworn. Spinal sockets were penetrated by the invasive connection needles of power armour locking into place. Vision was tinted murder-red by helms descending over faces.

  “I have not seen Octavia since long before her surgery yesterday,” Cyrion ventured. “How does our Navigator fare, artificer?”

  Septimus did not look over from where he was fastening an oath scroll to Talos’ shoulder. The parchment was the white of fresh cream, detailing in Talos’ flowing Nostraman handwriting all of the mission objectives, and his blood-sworn promises to succeed in each one. Oaths of Moment like these were no longer common within the Legion. Xarl also wore one, but Mercutian, Uzas, Cyrion and Adhemar abstained from the tradition.

  “She is well, Lord Cyrion,” said Septimus. “I expect she is with Navigator Etrigius again. They spend much time in discussion. They… often argue, apparently.”

  “I see. My thanks for the work you did on my bolter.” As he spoke, he held the weapon up, looking over it as he cradled the weapon in his gauntlets. The name “Banshee” was written upon its side in swirling Nostraman script.

  “A pleasure to serve, Lord Cyrion.”

  “How is the void-born? Is she well?”

  Septimus froze as he checked the rivets of Talos’ shoulder guards. “The… the what, Lord Cyrion?”

  “The void-born. How is she?”

  “What’s this now?” Uzas asked, suddenly interested.

  “She is a mortal, brother. Beneath your concern,” said Cyrion.

  “She is… well, thank you, Lord Cyrion.”

  “Good to hear. Don’t look so surprised, we’re not all blind to the goings on of the ship. Take her my regards, will you?”

  “Yes, Lord Cyrion.”

  “Did she like her gift?” asked Talos.

  Septimus forced himself not to freeze again. “Yes, lord.”

  “What gift?” Uzas sounded irritated to be excluded.

  “A Legion medallion,” said Talos. “This mortal is treasured by some of the crew. Apparently, treasured enough to warrant my protection.” Talos turned to Septimus again, and the slave’s blood froze. “Without my permission.”

  “Forgive me, master.”

  “I heard holes were drilled into the coin, and she wears it as a necklace,” Talos continued. “Is that desecration, Cyrion? Defiling Legion relics?”

  “I think not, brother. But I shall take the matter up with the Exalted. We must be certain of such things.”

  Septimus’ smile was forced, and he swallowed again. He tried to speak. He failed.

  “Forgive us a moment’s levity at your expense, Septimus,” Talos said. He flexed his fists, rotating his wrists, testing the ease of motion. His right gauntlet was definitely stiff. A replacement must be found soon.

  Faroven. Faroven, the brother that Talos saw die in a dream. From his body, would the new gauntlet come.

  His end cannot be far away now.

  Cyrion clamped his bolter to his thigh on its magnetic coupling. “Aye, it’s been a long time since we were mortal. Strange how you forget how to joke.”

  Septimus nodded again, unsure if even now Cyrion was making fun of him, and still far from comfortable with such “humour”.

  “By the way,” Cyrion added. “Take this.”

  Septimus caught the coin easily, one hand taking it out of the air on its downward arc. It was a twin to Talos’ own coin, silver and marked the same, but for Cyrion’s name in the written runes.

  “If you’re going to give mine away and doom me to watching over a ten-year-old girl,” Talos said, “I need to keep you alive somehow.”

  Septimus bowed in deep thanks to both of them, and finished his duties in humbled and confused silence.

  It had taken Octavia barely five minutes to decide that she didn’t like Etrigius at all.

  According to the Covenant’s Navigator, he had known upon first seeing her that he disliked her. This was the kind of fact he found necessary to share.

  Etrigius wasn’t even remotely human anymore. That was little concern to Octavia, and nowhere near as shocking to her as many of the more mundane aspects of life aboard the Covenant.

  She was a Navigator, a scion of the Navis Nobilite, and even if her House name wasn’t worth an iota of respect in the great and wide galaxy, she was still a daughter of humanity’s most precious bloodlines.

  She knew what the Navigator gene did to all of her kind in time. In that regard, sitting with the no-longer-human form of Etrigius was disconcerting but never truly unnerving.

  Much worse was his penchant for glorifying his own existence.

  These nightly lessons were now her duty—he’d made that clear the first time he’d demanded her presence weeks before—but they were far from pleasant.

  Etrigius’ domain was the antithesis of the gloom that pervaded the Covenant’s innards the way blood ran through a body’s veins. He claimed a modest chamber close to the ship’s massively-armoured prow, and bathed the room in oppressive white light from glow-globes mounted on the walls. Octavia found the brightness hard to bear after the ship’s dark halls. Her warp eye remained covered, but her human eyes wept stinging tears each time she came to visit the other Navigator in his den. The illumination of false sunlight after a month of night.

  “Can you dim these lights?” she asked the first time she’d been granted admittance by Etrigius’ robed slaves.

  “No,” he said, seeming to muse. “I dislike the dark.”

  “It might be said that you’re on the wrong ship.”

  Camaraderie had threatened to bloom between them at that moment. They had one thing in common that no other soul shared. Yet instead of a unity forming, they’d quickly descended into bickering and vague tolerance.

  Etrigius’ attendants—not one of them unaugmented and younger than sixty—admitted her to “the master’s gallery”. The title was appropriate. An entire wall was taken up with pict screens reflecting dozens of views from different points of the ship’s outer hull. As it was, the screens showed the rest of the Warmaster’s battle-fleet, and the world the Covenant orbited.

  In the warp… the screens would come into their own. Octavia had to admire the wish to see every angle of the ship as one guided it through the sea of souls.

  The rest of the chamber was much less admirable. And much less tidy. Clothes were piled here and there, strewn across the floor, as well as jewellery. When she’d first entered, her boot had crunched a golden earring into the ground. Etrigius, thankfully, hadn’t noticed.

  Octavia suspected Etrigius had been handsome at one point. If not handsome, then at least well-presented. Before his service in the Great Crusade and the century of chronological time since. She formed this opinion from his voice and bearing, both of which remained cultured and polite despite his many other changes from the near-human he’d been at birth.

  His skin was grey. Not the wan tone of a sunless existence, nor even the pale grey of the dead or the dying. It was grey the way a deepwater shark’s belly was grey: fish-like but unsealed, thick, completely inhuman.

  His fingers were almost armoured in gold and ruby, such was the number of rings he wore. Octavia was no expert, but what confused her was that the rings varied in quality from the exquisitely valuable to the almost worthless. What seemed to be the only common factor was that each ring was a shade of red set in a mounting of gold.

  The Navigator’s many-ringed thumbs and fingers each possessed an extra joint. Octavia would lose track of what she was saying if she got lost in their eerie, hypnotic, curling movements. Fingernails more akin to a feline’s claws sickle-curved from the tips of Etrigius’ grey fingers. These he used to stroke
the tattered leather of his observation couch, forever seeming to engineer new splits in the material.

  The rest of Etrigius’ body was masked by a robe of the same deep blue favoured by the Legion’s warriors. His domed head was smooth enough for Octavia to be sure no hair ever grew there, and his “human” eyes were always masked in pressurised goggles with thick clear lenses, featuring some strange violet fluid swirling within. She’d asked what the liquid in his lenses was, asked how he even saw through the murk, but he’d deigned not to answer. Etrigius did that a great deal. Evidently, he only answered topics he found worthy of discussion.

  “They have freed your warp eye,” he murmured, with something resembling awe.

  She touched the bandana tied around her forehead. “I think they must be coming to trust me. I mean, after I took the name… After Talos saved me…”

  “I was not informed of this. Why was I not told you were to be unblinded?”

  “Is it any of your business?”

  “I am the Navigator for the Covenant of Blood. Any issue pertaining to the warp is within my purview.”

  “I’ve been sitting here an hour listening to you. You only just noticed the metal was gone from my forehead?”

  “This was the first time I have bothered to face in your direction,” he said, and it was true enough. Etrigius was not enamoured of eye contact.

  “I am tired of feeling helpless on this ship,” she said, more to herself than to him.

  Etrigius smiled, for once, with apparent sincerity. “Do not expect that to fade, girl.”

  She watched him in silence for several moments, hoping he would continue.

  “We are at once slaves and slavemasters,” he said. “Enslaved, yet valuable beyond measure.” Etrigius gestured to the screens, displaying the Chaos fleet orbiting Crythe. “Without us, these traitors are crippled. Their endless crusade could never be fought.”

  Octavia’s gaze never left the grey man’s. “Did you choose this life?”

  “No. And neither will you. But we will both live it, all the same.”

  “Why would I wish to seal myself away in here?” she countered.

  “What Navigator can be satisfied without a vessel to guide?” The words left his lips with a sickeningly condescending sense of kindness.

  Octavia shook her head without realising she was even doing so. An unconvincing denial, truly no more than an instinctive need to say no.

  Etrigius smiled that same smile. “You hunger to sail the stars, as we all do. It’s in the blood. You can no more hide that desire than you can hide the need to breathe. When the time comes, when the Astartes ask you to guide them… you will say yes.”

  Octavia once more felt the potential for a connection between them. She could have used that moment to ask for revelations about navigating the warp without using the guiding light of the Emperor’s Astronomican. She could have said any one of a hundred things to bridge the gap between herself and her fellow Navigator.

  Instead, she rose to her feet and left. A cold-blooded sense of inevitability had stolen her tongue.

  When Septimus found her, she was in Blackmarket.

  In the Covenant’s mortal decks, a communal chamber linked many of the individual halls and quarters, and as the Great Crusade played out across the galaxy, the Legion’s loyal servants and slaves came to use the chamber as a trading post and a place to gather. The black market, as it was back then, derived its name from the perpetual darkness of the chamber, only marginally dispelled by lamp packs and glow-globes. Even with a full crew in better days, the mortal decks had endured the same scarce illumination as they did now.

  Fifty or so people crowded the chamber. His status ensured he received respectful nods or greetings from most of them, even from the clusters of rival gang emissaries here to trade for ammunition and power packs. Here, in all its shadowed glory, was a microcosm of fallen Nostramo, born afresh in the blackness.

  One old woman pressed her grimy hands to the bronze surface of his augmented temple and eyebrow.

  “It’s not so bad,” she smiled, exposing rotten teeth in her otherwise kindly, lined face.

  “I’m getting used to it.”

  “The surgery took you from us for too long. Weeks! We worried!”

  “I thank you for your concern, Shaya.”

  “Nale’s gang was killed close to the enginarium decks.” She dropped her voice. “None of the others are claiming responsibility. There’s talk it’s another beast, come from the deepest dark.”

  Septimus felt a grim mood settling firmly on his shoulders. He had been part of the hunting party to slay the last warp-creature that spawned in the bowels of the ship.

  “I will speak with the masters. I promise.”

  “Bless you, Septimus,” she said. “Bless you.”

  “I… heard Octavia was here?”

  “Ah, yes. The new girl.” The old woman smiled again, gesturing to a market stall with a small group of people stood around. “She is with the void-born.”

  With the…? Why?

  “My thanks,” he said, and moved on.

  Octavia was indeed with the void-born. The little girl, her pupils eternally huge in the gloom into which she was born, was showing Octavia a selection of articulated string puppets. Octavia stood at the stall, run by the void-born’s ageing mother and father. She smiled and nodded down at the girl’s presentation.

  Septimus came alongside the Navigator and bowed to the void-born’s parents. They greeted him and remarked on how his wounds were healing.

  “I had to get away from Etrigius,” Octavia said in Gothic. “I have the medallion now,” she added almost defensively. “So I went for a walk.”

  “The ship is still dangerous, medallion or not.”

  “I know,” she replied, not looking at him.

  “Do you understand anything she’s said?” Septimus nodded to the little girl.

  “Not a word. Her parents have been translating some. I just wanted to meet her. The respect she receives is incredible. People keep coming over, just to speak with her. Someone paid for a tiny lock of her hair.”

  “She is revered,” Septimus said. He looked down at the void-born, who was staring up through her ratty and snarled mop of long black hair.

  “Athasavis te corunai tol shathen sha’shian?” he asked.

  “Kosh, kosh’eth tay,” she smiled back. A beaming smile on her face, she held up the silver Legion medallion, holed through and strung on a leather thong cord. She wore it like a medal of honour. “Ama sho’shalnath mirsa tota. Ithis jasha. Ithis jasha nereoss.”

  Septimus offered her a little bow, smiling despite his black mood.

  “What did she say?” Octavia asked, trying to hide her disappointment at the Nostraman conversation.

  “She thanked me for the gift, and said she thinks my new eye is a very nice colour.”

  “Oh.”

  The void-born started babbling, pointing up at Octavia. Septimus smiled again.

  “She says you are very pretty, and asks if you are ever going to learn Nostraman, so you can talk to her properly.”

  Octavia nodded. “Jasca,” she said, then in a quieter voice to Septimus, “That’s ‘yes’, isn’t it?”

  “Jasca,” he replied. “It is. Come, we need to talk. I’m sorry I’ve been away since your surgery. It has been an interesting day since we last spoke.”

  He should never have been awakened.

  Had he not served with heart and courage and loyalty? Had he not slain the primarch’s enemies? Had he not obeyed the orders of the First Warmaster? What more did life demand of him?

  Now he walked once more, striding through the waking world. And for what? To witness the degeneration of everything the Legion had once been. To stand defiant against Vandred while 10th Company crumbled in the final moments of its decay.

  This was not life. This was an extension of an existence he had rightfully left behind.

  He was two bodies. A mind divided between two physical fo
rms. On one level, through his most immediate perceptions, he felt what was now: the vehicular strength of his tank-like body. The massive arms jointed by grinding servos. The claw capable of mangling adamantium and ceramite. The cannon capable of annihilating entire platoons of men.

  An unbreathing tireless avatar of the Mechanicum’s unity between flesh and machine.

  All of that could be dissolved within a single moment’s lapse in concentration. These immediate sensations were an effort to maintain. In the moments when the ancient warrior let his focus waver, he would feel himself, his mortal husk, encased within the sarcophagus and suspended in cold, cold, cold amniotic fluid.

  These truer sensations were sickening to dwell upon, but Malcharion’s attention tore back to them time and again. His legless, one-armed husk of a body, gently cradled in icy, gritty fluid. The back of his head and spine was a vertical splash of jagged, awkward pain as machine tendrils and MIU brain spikes needled his ravaged body, forcing his thoughts into junction with the Dreadnought body.

  Sometimes, when he tried to move his left arm—the claw-like power fist—he felt his true limb, the wasted fleshly limb, thumping weakly against the side of the amniotic coffin that housed his corpse. The first time he had tried to speak to Vandred, instead of the piercing tendrils within his mind carrying his thoughts into vox-voice, he had felt his true mouth open. Only then had he realised he breathed the freezing fluid now. It was how he stayed alive. Oil-thick and numbingly cold, the amniotics circulated through his respiratory system. The ooze caked his lungs, a dead weight within a helpless, strengthless body.

  A long time ago, he had battled alongside his brothers of the Iron Hands Legion. After those wars had ended, he battled against those same brothers. Malcharion knew their beliefs well. It was unconscionable to him that such stoic, resilient warriors found this eternal entombment to be some kind of glorious afterlife.

  “I will lead the next surface assault,” he’d boomed at the gathered Night Lords. The warriors of his Legion bowed their heads or thumped fists to breastplates in respect. In pride! Incredible. They saw only what was on the outside. They had no conception of the withered corpse within as its starved face pressed against the front of its coffin.