[Night Lords 02] - Blood Reaver

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

  Maruc couldn’t claim such a witness account himself. He suspected that was why he was still alive. He’d stuck to the smallest passages from when he’d first heard the reports of the killers coming aboard, leaving them only for necessities like raiding food stores or scavenging through stockrooms for battery packs.

  Too cold for that now. Now they had to move, and pray other sections of the station still had heat.

  For a time, he’d considered just giving up, just laying down in the confined crawlspace of a maintenance burrow and letting the ice take him. He’d probably never even decay after he died. At least, not until Adeptus Mechanicus salvage crews arrived to restart the heat exchangers… then no doubt he’d collapse and bubble away into a smear of rot along the steel.

  At the next junction, Maruc waited a long time, doing his best to listen over the sound of his own heartbeat. He started to move down the left passage.

  “I think we’re okay,” he whispered.

  Joroll shook his head. He wasn’t moving. “That’s the wrong way.”

  Maruc heard Dath sigh, but the other man said nothing. “This is the way to the canteen,” Maruc said as softly and calmly as he could manage, “and we need supplies. This isn’t the time to argue, Jor.”

  “That’s not the way to the canteen. It’s to the right.” Joroll pointed down the opposite corridor.

  “That’s towards the Eastern technical deck,” Maruc replied.

  “No, it’s not.” Joroll’s voice was rising now, with a querulous edge. “We should go this way.” The nearby ventilator fan continued its slow clicking.

  “Let’s just go,” Dath said to Maruc. “Leave him.”

  Joroll spoke before Maruc had to make the choice, for which the ageing manufactorum worker was immensely grateful. “No, no, I’ll come. Don’t leave me.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Maruc said gently, having no idea if it would really make any difference. “And keep your torches low.”

  Maruc led them on. Another left. Another. A long corridor, then a right. He froze at the turn, reluctantly aiming his torch down the hallway at the double bulkhead entrance to the canteen.

  “No…” his voice was soft, strengthless in a way even whispers weren’t.

  “What is it?” Joroll hissed.

  Maruc narrowed his stinging eyes, letting the beam of light play around the sundered doorway. The bulkhead was off its joints, torn from the wall in a wrenched mess of abused metal.

  “It’s not good,” Maruc murmured. “The killers have been here.”

  “They’ve been everywhere,” said Dath. He almost sighed the words out.

  Maruc stood shivering in the biting cold, his torch beam falling victim to the tremors of his hands. “Let’s go,” he whispered. “Quietly.”

  As they drew near the broken doors, Joroll sniffed. “I smell something.”

  Maruc breathed in slowly. The air felt cold enough to scald his lungs with iceburn, but he didn’t smell a damn thing beyond wet metal and his own stink. “I don’t. What is it?”

  “Spices. Bad spices.”

  Maruc turned away from the quivering look in Joroll’s eyes. He was cracking now, no doubt about it.

  Maruc was the first one to turn the corner. He crept to the edge of the torn doorway, looking around the large chamber in its wash of siren-red lighting, unable to make any real detail out from the gloom. The tables, dozens of them, were overturned and thrown around, to be left wherever they landed. The walls were dark and pitted with gunfire’s touch, and a horde of chairs were spilled across the floor—doubtless the remains of a worthless barricade. Bodies, lots of bodies, lay draped over the tables and stuck spread-eagled to the icy floor. Open eyes glinted with frost crystals, while smears of blood had become beautiful pools of ruby glass.

  At least nothing was moving. Maruc lifted the torch and let the light shine in. The darkness parted before the torch, and the lamp pack revealed what the emergency lighting hadn’t.

  “Throne of the God-Emperor,” he whispered.

  “What is it?”

  Immediately, he lowered his torch beam. “Stay here.” Maruc wasn’t going to risk Joroll’s patchwork sanity in there. “Just stay here, I’ll get what we need.”

  He entered the canteen, boots crunching on the red glass puddles of frozen blood. His breath was white mist before his face, curling away in the dim light as he moved. Giving the bodies a wide berth wasn’t easy—Maruc did all he could to avoid touching them, though he couldn’t help looking. What torchlight had shown in grim clarity was more obvious up close: not a single corpse in this chamber had escaped desecration. He stepped over a skinned woman with cringing care, and moved around a heap of leathery strips, where her harvested flesh was frozen to the floor. As he moved, her leering, skinless face of bared veins and blackening muscle offered him a toothy smile.

  Some of the bodies were little more than reddened skeletons, either missing limbs or barely articulated at all, ice-dried and hard as they lay across tables. The chill had done a lot to steal the smell, but Maruc could tell now what Joroll was talking about. Bad spices, indeed.

  He crept closer to the closed storage bulkhead, praying the wheel-lock wouldn’t squeal when he turned it. Maruc braced against the frostbitten metal in his hands and twisted it. For once, fortune was on his side—it gave with a sudden lurch and turned with well-oiled mercy. With a deep breath, he hauled the bulkhead open, revealing the walk-in storage room behind.

  It looked unlooted. Shelves of dried ration packs in boxes, crates of reconstituted meat product; every container stamped proud with the aquila or the cog of Mars. Maruc was three steps in when he heard the scream behind him.

  He knew he could hide. He could shut the storage door and freeze to death alone, or find a crawlspace and wait for whatever was happening to be over. His only weapon was the lamp pack in his numb hand, after all.

  Joroll screamed again, the sound disgustingly wet. Maruc was running before he realised it, boots slapping on the cold floor.

  A killer entered the canteen, dragging Joroll and Dath in its hands. Throne, the thing was huge. Its black armour in the red gloom was a smear of ink spilled into blood, and the vicious buzz rising from its internal power generator was enough to make Maruc’s teeth itch.

  Joroll was dead weight in its hand, the dark fist wrapped around a throat that shouldn’t bend that far back. Dath was still kicking, still screaming, dragged by a handful of hair in the killer’s clutch.

  Maruc threw the lamp pack from his sweaty grip. It clanged off the killer’s shoulder guard, spinning away from the icon of a winged skull without leaving a dent.

  It caused the killer to turn, and growl two words through its helm’s vox speakers.

  “I see.”

  With casual indifference, the killer hurled Joroll’s corpse aside, dumping it on a table alongside a skinless body. Dath thrashed in the monster’s grip, his heels kicking at the icy ground seeking purchase, his numb hands clawing uselessly at the fist bunched in his long, greasy hair.

  Maruc didn’t run. He was sore to his bones from the cold and the cramped spaces, half-starved and exhausted from three nights without sleep. He was sick of living as a rat, with desperate fear the only emotion to break through the pains of hunger and the slow onset of frostbite. Too defeated to force a futile run, he stood in a chamber of skinned bodies and faced the killer. Would death be worse than living like this? Really?

  “Why are you doing this?” he voiced the thought that had rattled around his head for days.

  The killer didn’t stop. An armoured hand, already coated in frost, thumped around Maruc’s throat. The pressure was worse than the cold. He felt his spine creaking and crackling, felt his throat’s sinews crushed together to feel like a bunch of grapes in his neck, choking off any breath. The killer lifted him with slow care, anger emanating from the skull painted across its faceplate.

  “Is that a question?” The killer’s head tilted, regarding him with its unblinking red eye len
ses. “Is that something you wish to know the answer to, or is your mind misfiring in a moment of panic?” The grip on his throat loosened enough to allow speech and a few gasps of precious breath. Each heave of Maruc’s lungs drew stinking air into his body, cold enough to hurt.

  “Why?” He forced the word through spit-wet teeth.

  The killer growled its words from the skull-faced helm. “I made this Imperium. I built it, night after night, with my sweat and my pride and a blade in my hands. I bought it with the blood in my brothers’ veins, fighting at the Emperor’s side, blinded by his light in the age before you entombed him as a messiah. You live, mortal, only because of my work. Your existence is mine. Look at me. You know what I am. Look past what cannot be true, and see what holds your life in his hands.”

  Maruc felt piss running down his leg, boiling hot against his skin. The Great Betrayer’s fallen angels. Mythology. A legend. “Just a legend,” he croaked as he dangled. “Just a legend.” Breath from his denial steamed on the warrior’s armour.

  “We are not legends.” The killer’s fist tightened again. “We are the architects of your empire, banished from history’s pages, betrayed by the husk you worship as it rots upon a throne of gold.”

  Maruc’s stinging eyes took in the silver aquila emblazoned across the killer’s chestplate. The Imperial eagle, cracked and broken, worn by a heretic.

  “You owe us your life, mortal, so I give you this choice. You will serve the Eighth Legion,” the killer promised, “or you will die screaming.”

  IV

  ASUNDER

  Taking the station had been as easy as any of them could’ve hoped. There was pride to be taken there, albeit not much. If a warrior could find glory in capturing a backwater manufactorum installation like this, then Talos wouldn’t begrudge him for it. But as victories went, it rang hollow. A raid of necessity, not of vengeance. A supply run, the words taunted him, even as they dragged a smile across his lips. Not the kind of engagement that would be adorning the Legion’s banners for centuries to come.

  Still, he was pleased with Septimus. And glad to have him back aboard the ship—two months without an artificer had been an annoyance, to say the least.

  Three nights ago, Talos had taken his first steps onto the station’s decking. It was not a treasured memory. The boarding pod’s doors flowering open, twisting the steel of the station’s hull with that distinctive whine of protesting metal. Then, as always, emerging into a welcoming darkness. Visors pierced the black with programmed ease. Thermal blurs looked vaguely embryonic as they curled in upon themselves: humans on all fours; reaching blindly; cowering and weeping. Prey, crying around his ankles, resisting death by only the most pathetic and futile attempts.

  Humanity was at its ugliest when desperate to survive. The indignities people did to themselves. The begging. The tears. The frantic gunfire that could never pierce ceramite.

  The Eighth Legion stalked through the station almost unopposed, stealing what little excitement there might’ve been. Talos spent several hours listening to the braying of other Claws over the vox. Several had run amok, butchering and relishing in their ability to inspire fear in the trapped humans. How they’d cried their joy to one another, during those long hours of maddened hunting.

  “Those sounds,” Talos had said. “The voices of our brothers. What we are hearing is the Legion’s death rattle. Curious, how degeneration sounds so much like laughter.”

  Xarl had grunted in reply. It might have been a chuckle. The others forbore comment as they moved down the lightless corridors.

  Three nights had passed since then.

  For those three nights, First Claw had done as the Exalted had ordered, overseeing the Covenant’s resupply. Promethium fuel was taken in barrels and vats. Raw, roiling plasma was leeched out of the station’s generators. Ore of all kinds was taken in great loads to be turned into materiel in the Covenant’s artificer workshops. Useful members of the station’s crew—of the few hundred that escaped the initial massacres—were dragged aboard the ship in chains. The vessel still remained docked, even now sucking what it needed through fuel lines and cargo loaders.

  Six hours ago, Talos had been one of the last to drag slaves aboard, finding them hiding in a canteen that had clearly been a site for one of the Claws’ butchery. According to the Exalted, the Covenant of Blood would remain docked another two weeks, leeching everything of worth from the processing plants and factory foundries.

  All was as well as could be expected, until someone slipped the leash. The slaughter aboard Ganges was done, but some souls were never satisfied.

  A lone warrior stalked the Covenant’s decks, blades in his hands, blood on his faceplate, and his thoughts poisoned by superstitions of a curse.

  It was a curse, to be a god’s son.

  Were these not the prophet’s own whining words? It was a curse to be a god’s son. Well, perhaps that was so. The hunter was willing to concede the point. Maybe it was a curse. But it was also a blessing.

  In his quiet hours, when he was granted mercy for even a moment, the hunter believed that this was a truth the others too often forgot. Forever they looked to what they didn’t have; what they no longer possessed; glories they would never achieve again. They saw only the lack, never the plenty, and stared into the future without drawing strength from the past. That was no way to live.

  A familiar pressure grew behind his eyes, worming its way within his skull. He had lingered too long in the stillness of reflection, and a price would be paid in pain. Hungers had to be sated, and punishments were inflicted when they weren’t.

  The hunter moved on, his armoured boots echoing along the stone floor. The enemy fled before him, hearing the ticking thrum of active battle armour and the throaty rattle of an idling chainblade. The axe in his hands was a thing of fanged and functional beauty, its tooth-tracks oiled by sacred unguents as often as blood.

  Blood. The word was a splash of acid across his cobwebbing thoughts. The unwanted scent of it, the unwelcome taste, the flowing of stinking scarlet from ruptured flesh. The hunter shivered, and looked to the gore lining his weapon’s edge. Immediately, he regretted it—blood had dried in a crimson crust on the axe’s chainsaw teeth. Pain flared again, as jagged as knives behind the eyes, and didn’t fade this time. The blood was dry. He had waited too long between kills.

  Screaming released the pressure, but his hearts were pounding now. The hunter broke into a run.

  The next death belonged to a soldier. He died with his hands smearing sweat-streaks over the hunter’s eyes, while the ropey contents of his stomach spilled out in a wet mess down his legs.

  The hunter cast the disembowelled human against the wall, breaking bones with barely a shove. With his gladius—a noble blade that had suffered a century’s use as little more than a skinning knife—he severed the dying man’s head. Blood painted his gauntlets as he held the harvest, turning it over in his hands, seeing the shape of the skull through the pale skin.

  He imagined flaying it, first slicing pale peels of skin free, then carving ragged strips of veined meat from the bone itself. The eyes would be pulled from the sockets, and the innards flushed by acidic cleansing oils. He could picture it so clearly, for it was a ritual he’d performed many times before.

  The pain started to recede.

  In the returning calm, the hunter heard his brothers. There, the prophet’s voice. Enraged, as always. There, the wretched one’s laughter, grinding against the prophet’s orders. The quiet one’s questions were a muted percussion beneath all of this. And there, the dangerous one’s snarls punctuated everything.

  The hunter slowed as he tried to make out their words. They hunted as he hunted, that much he could make out from their distant buzzing. His name—they spoke it again and again. Confusion. Anger.

  And yet they spoke of savage prey. Here? In the derelict hallways of this habitation tower? The only savagery was that which they brought themselves.

  “Brothers?” he spoke into t
he vox.

  “Where are you?” the prophet demanded. “Uzas. Where. Are. You.”

  “I…” He stopped. The skull lowered in a loosening hand, and the axe lowered alongside it. The walls leered with threatening duality, both stone and steel, both carved and forged. Impossible. Maddeningly impossible.

  “Uzas.” That voice belonged to the snarling one. Xarl. “I swear by my very soul, I will kill you for this.”

  Threats. Always the threats. The hunter’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a wet grin. The walls became stone once more, and the threatening voices of his brothers melted back into an ignorable buzz. Let them hunt as they wished, and catch up when they could.

  Uzas broke into another run, mumbling demands to the god with a thousand names. No prayers left his lips, for no son of Curze would ever speak a word of worship. He commanded the divinities to bless his bloodshed, sparing no thought for whether they might refuse. They had never done so before, and they would not do so now.

  Mechanical teeth bit into armour and flesh. Last cries left screaming mouths. Tears left silver trails down pale cheeks.

  To the hunter, these things signified nothing more than the passing of time.

  Soon enough, the hunter stood within a chapel, licking his teeth, listening to the growl of his axe’s engine echoing back off the stone. Broken bodies lay to his left and right, thickening the cool air with blood-stink. The surviving vermin were backed into a corner, raising weapons that couldn’t harm him, pleading with words he would only ignore.

  His thermal hunting vision cancelled, leaving him watching the prey through targeting locks and red eye lenses. The humans cringed back from him. None of them had even fired a shot.

  “Lord…” one of them stammered.