[Night Lords 02] - Blood Reaver

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

  XII

  PROPHET AND PRISONER

  “You will come with us to Vilamus.”

  “I knew this was all going too well,” Cyrion voxed over a private channel. Talos ignored him.

  “That is the price of my aid,” the seated figure added. “When we lay siege to Vilamus, your forces will be in the vanguard.”

  Lord Huron’s throne room in Hell’s Iris was hardly devoted to any suggestion of subtlety. The station’s war room had been converted to a monarch’s chamber, replete with a raised throne and rows of crusade banners hanging from the ceiling. Rows of bodyguards, supplicants and beseechers lined the walls: human, Renegade Astartes, and creatures lost in the mutable states of those in thrall to Chaos worship. The decking showed its stains with unwashed pride—blood, burns and greyish slime in equal measure—while the air bore the stink of something sulphurous, rising from the breath of the gathered warriors.

  It all added to the pain-pulse buzzing inside the prophet’s skull.

  “Nothing,” Mercutian voxed quietly, “bears the same stench as a Red Corsair haven.”

  Talos had replaced his own helm upon entering the station. “We have to agree to his wishes. Huron won’t let us leave alive if we refuse.”

  “His offer is suicide,” Cyrion pointed out. “We’re all aware of that.”

  “We should confer with the Exalted,” replied Mercutian.

  “Yes,” Xarl smiled behind his faceplate. “I’m sure that will happen. Just agree, Talos. The smell of this place is seeping through my armour.”

  “Well?” the enthroned figure asked.

  Lord Huron’s ravaged features stared with delighted interest. He was not a man with a mind to hide his emotions, and what remained of his human face was twisted into a leer that bled superiority. He knew he’d won even before these dregs of the Eighth Legion came before him to beg, and he felt no qualms in showing the triumph across his brutalised visage. Yet, even in his monstrous exultation, little of pettiness showed. He almost seemed to share the joke with First Claw.

  Talos rose from his knees. Behind him, First Claw did the same. Variel stood to the side, his face a careful mask of passionless boredom.

  “It will be done, Lord Huron,” Talos said. “We agree to your terms. When do we sail?”

  Huron reclined in the osseous throne, the very image of an ancient, indecorous warlord. “As soon as my work crews have resurrected your broken Covenant of Blood. A month, maybe less. You will provide the materials?”

  Talos nodded. “The Ganges raid was most fruitful, my lord.”

  “Ah, but you fled from the Marines Errant. Not as fruitful as the venture might otherwise have been, eh?”

  “No, lord.” The prophet watched the warlord, wishing it was easier to dislike Huron’s disarming informality. A strange, reluctant charisma bled from the Corsair Lord’s wounded carcass in a trickling aura.

  “I watched the Covenant drift in, you know,” he said. “How you let such a grand ship fall into ruin is, I suspect, something of a tale.”

  “It is, sire,” Talos conceded. “I would be glad to speak of it at a more opportune time.”

  Huron blinked his dry eyes. Mirth enlivened them, and his shoulder guards rattled with the laughter he kept beneath his breath.

  “Now seems the perfect time, Night Lord.” Around the chamber came the rumbling chuckles of Legionary voices. “Let us hear the story now.”

  Talos swallowed, his mind racing beneath the pain. Huron’s conversational noose was as simple and blunt as it was unavoidable. In a moment of foolish instinct, he almost glanced at Variel.

  “My lord,” the prophet inclined his head, “I believe you already know the vital aspects of our sufferance at Crythe. A more poetic voice than mine is required to do the tale any justice.”

  Huron licked his corpse-lips. “Indulge me. Speak to me of how you betrayed the Black Legion, and ran from the Blood Angels.”

  More laughter from the armed audience.

  “I curse the Exalted for sending us to do this,” Cyrion sighed.

  “He’s baiting us,” Xarl’s voice was low, cold.

  The prophet wasn’t so sure. He bowed theatrically, feigning a role in the amusement at First Claw’s expense. “Forgive me, Lord Huron, I forgot how difficult it must be for you to receive pure information on the war waged by the First Legions. Those of us who once walked at the sides of primarchs tend to forget how distant and isolated the lesser Renegade Astartes must feel. I will tell you of Abaddon’s preparations for the coming crusade and the Night Lords’ place within it, of course. I only hope you will enlighten us as to whatever games you and your pirates have been playing, so far from the war’s front lines.”

  As Talos’ words fell across the silent chamber, Uzas sniggered like a child over the vox.

  “And you rebuke Xarl for his diplomacy?” Mercutian sounded aghast. “You’ve killed us all, prophet.”

  Talos said nothing. He merely watched the warlord upon the throne. Ranks of Red Corsairs stood at attention, waiting for the order to open fire. A stunted, inhuman creature skittered around their armoured boots, cackling to itself.

  Huron, master of the Maelstrom and the largest pirate warfleet in the Eastern reaches of the galaxy, finally allowed his face to split into a smile. It took obvious effort to make the expression, the grin formed from twitching muscles and quivering, nerveless lips.

  “I would have liked to walk upon Nostramo,” the Tyrant said at last. “In my experience, its sons have an entertaining sense of humour.” Huron drummed his armoured talons on the armrests of his throne, releasing a mouthful of laughter closer to a gargle.

  “I am glad to entertain you, lord, as always.” Talos was smiling himself.

  “You are still a soul blinded by overconfidence, you know.”

  “It is a curse,” the prophet agreed. The warlord gave another of his burbling, throaty chuckles—the sound of unspat bile trapped in wounded lungs. Thin pistons compressed with clicks, visible through the patchwork skin of the warlord’s throat.

  “And what if I’d not required you for this little task, Legionary? Then what?”

  “Then you’d have aided us from the goodness of your own heart, lord.”

  “I can see why the Exalted loathes you.” The Corsair Lord grinned again.

  It bled the tension from the chamber in a rush of acidic breath. Huron rose, gesturing to the Night Lords with his oversized metal claw. At the movement, the creature loping around the chamber—a hairless, wretched little quadruped with skinny malformed limbs—scampered over to the warlord and climbed Huron’s armour plating with its knobbly talons. The Corsair lord paid it no heed as it clutched onto his back-mounted power pack, gripping with its taloned hands. Swollen eyes glared at the Night Lords, and its awkward teeth clicked together with a stuttering rattle.

  “What. The hell. Is that?” Cyrion breathed.

  Talos whispered a reply. “I’m not sure I want to know.”

  “It looks like someone skinned the spawn of a monkey and a dog. I believe one of you should tell the Blood Reaver that he has an abomination crawling over his back.”

  “I think he knows, Cy.”

  Huron beckoned to them again, his claw squealing as its joints moved.

  “Come, warriors of the First Legions. I have something of yours that you may wish to see.”

  The myriad decks of Hell’s Iris thronged with life, but the Tyrant’s honour guard had sequestered an entire level of the star-fortress for the Corsairs’ own use. Here, guarded by Huron’s most capable warriors, the command structure of the Red Corsairs made their plans to strike out against the Imperium. And here, under the watchful eyes of the Chapter’s elite, the Tyrant liked to keep unwelcome guests incarcerated at his leisure.

  As they walked through the quieter corridors, boots clanking on the decking, Talos let his gaze drift over the profaned metal walls. Each bore a manuscript’s worth of blasphemous screeds and incantations, inked and branded into the naked
steel.

  Huron’s movements drew the prophet’s eyes more than once. The master of the Red Corsairs was a shattered creature, but his dragging limp belied the suppressed power in every jerking movement. Seeing him now, this close—close enough that the sickly flickering light glinted back from his tarnished armour plating—it was no trouble at all to discern why the former Tyrant of Badab remained alive. Some warriors were too stubborn to die.

  Had he been mortal, Talos suspected Huron’s presence would be enough to cow him into obeisance. Few other warleaders exuded such an unpalatable aura of threat, born of a destroyed face, a pained smile, and the growl of fibre-bundle cabling in his armour joints. But then, few other warleaders commanded a secessionist empire, let alone an astral kingdom of such immense size and might.

  “Something in my face interests you, prophet?”

  “Your wounds, my lord. Is there much pain?”

  Huron bared his teeth to the curious question. Both warriors were the painstaking product of extensive, archaic genetic manipulation and bio-surgery, making pain a relative concept to post-human warriors with two hearts, three lungs, and the habit of spitting acid.

  “A great deal,” the Corsair lord said, leaving it at that.

  Behind First Claw, the lumbering forms of Red Corsair Terminators filled the corridor, plodding along in tank-like obstinance. The hairless little mutant scrabbled around their heels. Cyrion kept casting looks back at it.

  “Before I give you this gift,” Huron’s tongue moistened his cracked lips again, “tell me, Night Lord, why you risked that ludicrous jest with me in the throne room.”

  The answer came smoothly, relayed through his helm’s vox-speakers. “Your empire is a cancer webbing through the Imperium’s heart, and it is said you command as many warriors as any Legion lord except for the Warmaster himself.” Talos turned to glance at Huron, the warlord’s broken features outlined by a target lock. “I do not know if that is true, Lord Huron, but I doubted such a man would be so petty or ungracious as to vent his anger over a few spoken words.”

  Huron’s reply was no more than a flicker of amusement in his bloodshot eyes.

  “Will we even want this gift?” Xarl voxed to the others.

  “Not if it’s what I think it is,” Cyrion’s voice came back, a little distracted. “That little thing is still following us. I may shoot it.”

  “Ezhek jai grugull shivriek vagh skr,” Huron announced, bringing them all to a halt.

  “I do not speak any of the Badab dialects,” Talos confessed.

  Huron answered by gesturing at a sealed bulkhead door with his massive power claw. The curving talons had been painted the same red as his ceramite a long time ago, but battle had slowly disintegrated the weapon’s appearance, leaving it scorched black from flame. The Tyrant inclined his head to the Night Lords, and the overhead illumination strips reflected their light back off the chrome portions of his bare skull.

  “Here is what I wished you to see,” he said. “Tormenting it has been both useful and entertaining, but I suspect you would take pleasure in seeing it, as well. Consider this viewing a token of gratitude for accepting my offer.”

  The bulkhead began to rise, and Talos resisted the urge to draw his weapons.

  “Keep your helms on,” the Tyrant warned.

  He couldn’t tell how long he’d waited: blind, alone, and feeling the unwanted sting of tears trailing down his face. The shackles were no punishment at all, despite how they gripped his wrists to bind him to the wall. Likewise, the onset of starvation was a pain to be overcome, something to be ignored along with the bite of desperate thirst that scratched like sand in his veins.

  The collar leashing his throat—now that was punishment, but one born of a weaker breed. He couldn’t see the runic scripture inscribed upon the cold metal, but it was impossible not to feel their emanations. Pulse, pulse, pulse in his neck, with the same, inevitable throbbing of an infected tooth. To be denied a voice and the power wrought by his every whispered word… it was humiliating, but that made it nothing more than another humiliation to be heaped upon so many other indignities.

  No. He could, and would, withstand such things. He could even endure the other minds burrowing into his own, their careless, invisible probes thrashing aside his mental defences with all the ease of idiot children ripping through paper. It hurt to think; it hurt to remember; it hurt to do anything but force his mind to a meditative blankness.

  Still. He could survive it, holding his psyche intact through shivering concentration.

  But the light was another matter. He knew he’d screamed for a time, though he’d no perception of just how long. After the screaming, he’d rocked back and forth, head lowered to his bare chest, drooling acid through clenched teeth. The chlorine stink of dissolving metal had only added to his nausea, as his spit ate into the floor.

  His strength deserted him at last. After weeks—months?—he now knelt with his arms wide, wrists bound to the wall behind, head loose on an aching neck, eyes dripping tears, unable to lubricate past the pain. The light splashed against his closed eyelids with corrosive intent, a press of misty white bright enough to drag tears from the eyes of a soul otherwise beyond sorrow.

  Through this haze of pain and messy clouding of his thoughts, the prisoner heard the door to his cell opening once more. He took three slow breaths, as if they could expel the pain from his body, and breathed out the words he’d been waiting to say for the entirety of his bloodless crucifixion.

  “When I am free,” he spat the words out with strings of saliva, “I will kill every single one of you.”

  One of his tormentors came closer. He heard it in the purr of armour joints, the soft grinding of machinery muscles.

  “Athrillay, vylas,” his torturer whispered in a dead language, from a dead world. Yet his captors knew no such tongue.

  The prisoner raised his head, staring blindly forward, and repeated the words back.

  “Greetings,” he said, “brother.”

  Talos didn’t want to imagine the prisoner’s pain—his own retinal display struggled to dull the atrocious strength of the chamber’s lights, and even behind his faceplate he felt the sting of tears at the aggravating brightness.

  He curled his armoured fingers through the captive’s unshaven, greasy hair, and yanked the prisoner’s head back, baring the sweating throat. His words were a Nostraman hiss, pitched low to defeat unwanted ears.

  “I swore to kill you when next we met.”

  “I remember it.” Ruven smiled through the pain. “Now is your chance, Talos.”

  The prophet drew his gladius, pressing the blade’s edge against the prisoner’s cheek. “Give me one reason not to peel the skin from your treacherous bones.”

  Ruven choked out a laugh. As he shook his head, the sword rubbed against his flesh, slicing a shallow gash.

  “I have no reasons to give you. Spare us both the pretence that I will beg for my life, and just do as you will.”

  Talos withdrew the blade. For a moment, he did nothing but watch the drop of blood crawl its wet way down the steel. “How did they catch you?”

  Ruven swallowed. “The Warmaster cast me aside. For my failures at Crythe.”

  Talos couldn’t help the crooked grin that took hold. “And you fled here?”

  “Of course. Where else? What other havens for our kind have such size and scope? Such potential? The Maelstrom was the only answer that made sense.” The prisoner’s face twisted into a snarl. “I did not know some of my erstwhile brothers had so harmed the Eighth Legion’s reputation with the Corsairs.”

  Talos was still watching the blood trickle down. “We made few friends last time we were here,” he said. “But that’s not why Huron took you prisoner, is it? These might be your last words, brother. Lies have no place in a valediction.”

  Ruven said nothing for a time. Then, in a sibilant whisper: “Look at me.”

  Talos did so. Streams of bio-data flickered across his visor. “You are de
hydrated to the point of tissue damage,” he noted.

  The captive grunted. “Is that so? You should be an Apothecary.”

  “The truth, Ruven.”

  “The ‘truth’. Were it only so simple. Huron allowed me to remain at Hell’s Iris if I traded away the secrets I’d spent decades prying from the warp. At first, I conceded. Then there was an… altercation.” Ruven’s androgynous features split into a dry-gummed smile. “Three Corsairs died summoning denizens of the warp many times more powerful than they could bind. Tragic, Talos. So very tragic. Evidently, the dabbling fools were considered promising candidates for Huron’s Librarium.”

  The prophet stared at the sorcerer for some time.

  “You are still there, brother,” Ruven said. “I hear you.”

  “I am still here,” Talos agreed. “I am trying to discern the truth from your lies.”

  “I told you the truth. What purpose would lying serve? They have shackled me here for what feels like months, saturating my eyes with light. I cannot see. I cannot move. Abaddon cast me aside, stripping me of my role in his Black Legion. Why would I lie to you?”

  “That is what I intend to find out,” Talos replied, and rose to his feet. “Because I know you, Ruven. The truth is anathema to your tongue.”

  “A traitorous prize, is he not?” Lord Huron asked. “I am almost done with him, for he is no longer worth any amusement, and I believe he holds little information back from my sorcerers now. They have peeled all the lore they need from his mind.”

  “What were his crimes?” Talos glanced back at the kneeling form of his former brother bathed in the radiant light.

  “He caused the death of three initiates, and refused to share his knowledge. He had to be… encouraged… to do so, by other means.” The Blood Reaver’s cadaverous features peeled back into a smile. “Rendering him helpless was a trial in itself. Collared as he is, he is no threat. He cannot whisper into the warp to call forth his powers. Binding his warpcraft was the very first precaution I took, immediately before blinding him.”