“Thank you,” the warrior whispered. “Your obedience has spared you the same last meal your friend enjoyed.”
The not-an-Errant drew a silver blade as he crouched, resting the tip beneath Yeshic’s chin.
“Wait,” the serf wept. “Please.”
The warrior exhaled something like a sigh, confessing three words to the whimpering human. “I loathe begging.”
He thrust the blade upwards, burying it halfway to the hilt through tongue, palate, skull and brain. Yeshic convulsed, arms spasming against the duct’s sides with quiet clangs.
At last, the Meritoriam scribe fell still. The warrior worked quickly, cracking the sternum with the pommel of his combat blade, and hack-sawing through the ribcage with several chops. Once the ribs were broken, spread like open wings to reveal the harvest of organs beneath, the warrior kicked the corpse from the maintenance tunnel, letting it drop with a wet crack to the floor below. What had been inside the body began to leak out. That included the smell.
He regarded his rushed handiwork: the eyeless old man, the autopsied younger one; his ninth and tenth kills since arriving less than an hour before. What a fine discovery they would make for some oblivious menial.
The warrior paused only to clean his blade, sheathing it at his shin. The sirens chose that moment to begin.
Curious, Talos glanced back down at the gift he’d left, but the bodies were undisturbed. The sirens raged on. It sounded like the entire monastery was crying out in alarm, which, in a sense, was exactly the truth. Somewhere in this immense fortress, either his earlier handiwork—or that of his brothers—had been discovered.
XVIII
INFILTRATION
Huron’s plan had been easy to admire, as was the passion with which he’d presented it. Showing surprising humility and consideration to the one hundred warriors he was ordering to potential suicide, the Tyrant came on board the Covenant of Blood with a minimal honour guard to grant a personal address. On the Covenant’s bridge, flanked by two of his Terminator huscarls, the Corsair lord detailed his plan in full, highlighting the Night Lords’ potential avenues of assault. He even conceded the point that, ultimately, the Eighth Legion’s arrival was a fortuitous event. Their warriors were much more suited to the first phase of the invasion, and although he entrusted the results to them, he knew their finest chances of achieving victory would be through their own methods.
Talos had watched all of this, gathered with First Claw in a loose pack around the hololithic table. The other Claws did the same. Only one Night Lord stood alone, his armour freshly repainted, diminished by his isolation yet standing proud. Ruven had no Claw, for each of them had refused him. The Exalted and its Atramentar reacted harshest of all, vocally promising to slay the betrayer if he was foolish enough to offend them even once.
Partway through the speech, the Blood Reaver summoned a hololithic projection of the Vilamus fortress-monastery. Even the rough, flickering image ignited something akin to envy in Talos’ unwavering gaze. No fortress-monastery was the twin of any other, and Vilamus rose like an Ecclesiarchy cathedral, reinforced into a gothic bastion with staggered battlements, tiered ramparts, landing platforms and, on the highest levels, docks for warships drifting below low-orbit to be repaired at the Chapter’s sanctuary.
“We could crash the Covenant into it,” Xarl mused, “and it still wouldn’t make a dent.” He carried his helm under his arm. For reasons Talos couldn’t work out, since arriving at Hell’s Iris, Xarl had taken to wearing his ceremonial helm. Its ornamentation was an echo of the Legion’s emblem, with twin sleek, chiropteran wings rising in an elegant crest.
“Why are you wearing that?” Talos asked quietly, during the mission briefing.
Xarl looked at the helm in the crook of his arm, then scowled at the prophet. “No harm in a little pride, brother.”
Talos let it go. Perhaps Xarl had a point.
Huron paused to clear bile from his throat. Gears clanked in his neck and chest as he swallowed. “A fortress-monastery is a defensive bastion like no other. Each of you knows this, but even such strongholds have degrees of capability. Vilamus is no provincial castle on the Imperium’s border. The hololithic simulations of even the entire Corsair armada attacking from orbit make for grim viewing. Even with our fleet, that battle would not earn any of us much glory, I assure you.”
Several of the gathered warriors chuckled.
“You are right to question why I am using you so harshly,” Huron allowed. “And that is because if your Legion cannot complete the first steps of the invasion alone, then the siege itself has no hope of success. I am using you, but not as a master uses a slave. I am using you as a general wields a weapon.”
“What’s in it for us?” one of the Bleeding Eyes called out. The question elicited a chorus of hissing chuckles from the others. Thirty of them in all, most crouched to accommodate their clawed feet, though several—the least-changed among them—stood tall.
Huron didn’t smile. He inclined his head, as if acknowledging the question’s wisdom. “Some might say allowing your ship to enter my dock would be reward enough. But I am not selfish with the spoils of war. You know what I want from this assault. The Eighth Legion is free to plunder whatever it wishes, as long as the Marines Errant supply of gene-seed is left untouched. Take armour, relics, prisoners—I care for none of it. But if I find the gene vaults harvested, I will withdraw my amnesty. The Covenant will not simply be fired upon and chased from Corsair space as it was the last time you… stretched… my patience. It will be destroyed.”
The Exalted dragged its armoured bulk forwards, sending minute tremors through the deck. Massive claws came to rest on the table’s surface, and tumourous black eyes half-lidded themselves, warding against even the anaemic light of the hololithic projectors.
“Every Claw will take part in the surface assault. The only warriors remaining on the ship will be the Atramentar.” The creature paused to drag air and spittle back through its teeth. “I will deploy each Claw in drop-pods.”
“And how do we breach the orbital defences?” Karsha, the leader of Second Claw, addressed his question to Huron rather than the Exalted. “I assume you are not laying us all on the altar of fate in the hope a handful of us survive to do your bidding.”
Huron nodded again. “I understand your scepticism, but this offensive has been years in the planning. Raider fleets have coordinated across the subsector for years, forcing the Marines Errant into increasingly wide patrol routes. For almost a decade, the Chapter has reached farther and farther from their fortress, its crusading fleets devoted to watching over vulnerable Imperial shipping routes. I have sacrificed more than my fair share of ships to engineer this opportunity, and committed more warriors to early graves than I care to admit. The fortress-monastery is defended by—at most—a single company’s worth of Imperial Space Marines. Their fleet is gone, scattered across the subsector. All that remains are the orbital defence platforms, and though they are formidable, never in the Red Corsairs’ history has such a prize been open for the taking.”
Huron’s smile was every bit as predatory as any of the Night Lords. “Do you believe I would be so careless as to simply hurl warriors at the world, ruining our one chance of a clean assault? No. What is your name, Legionary?”
“Karsha.” The Night Lord didn’t bother to salute. “Karsha the Unsworn.”
“Karsha.” Huron gestured to the hololithic with his oversized power claw. The immense talons curled through a cluster of radar dishes mounted on one of the fortress’ eastern walls. “The sun, Vila, is being encouraged to bleed, haemorrhaging great flares into the void. Tides of solar wind and magnetic field disruption already flow through the Vilamus system. When the tides spill over the system’s worlds, each will suffer geomagnetic storms, lighting the sky with aurorae at the planets’ poles, and…”
Karsha growled in reluctant admiration. “And slaying all vox and auspex on the surface.”
“And in orbit.” Huron cor
rected. “Throughout the entire system, magnetic interference will butcher all scanning and transmission. The storm will leave our own assault practically blind, for we cannot rely on our own instruments when we commit to the siege. Infiltrating Vilamus will be no trial for any of you. The first phase should not test you at all. The second, however, will be when complications set in. We can discuss that later.”
Talos stepped forward. “How will you trigger the sun to initiate a coronal mass ejection?” Though he aimed the question at Huron, his gaze drifted to Ruven at the crowd’s edge. “Such a thing cannot be artificially bred.”
Ruven didn’t meet his eyes, but Huron did. “Nothing is impossible, prophet. My warp-weavers are capable of more than you realise.” He spoke the words without boasting, merely stating a fact. “It is a small thing, in truth, to reach into the heart of star and fire the arithmetic of fusion. My men know their task, and will die before failing me.”
“If you are able to blind the Marines Errant fortress-monastery,” Karsha affirmed, “then we will not fail.” Grunts and murmurs of assent travelled through the ranks. Xarl was grinning; Mercutian muttered to himself; while Uzas stared off into the middle distance, his gaze slack and unfocussed. Cyrion met Talos’ glance.
“Just as you said,” he agreed. “We’re fighting this one our way.”
The prophet nodded, but didn’t reply.
The same night, the Covenant of Blood broke dock and entered the warp, making for the Vila system.
The drop-pods fell nine days later.
As he moved through the labyrinth of maintenance tunnels and ventilation shafts, he kept one thought primed in his mind: as predators, they stood a chance; as prey, they’d not last a single night.
First Claw’s drop-pod had come down to the east of the fortress, driving home in one ravine among a clawed landscape of many. Erosion and tectonics had enjoyed millennia to work their influence, giving the world’s wastelands a scarred and hostile face. Once they’d climbed the canyon’s wall, they’d headed west at a sustainable sprint, scattering across the empty plateaus after nothing more than a few irritated farewells.
With almost two hundred kilometres of lifeless, waterless barren landscape to cover, Talos had reached the walls of the fortress-monastery three nights after leaving the canyon. He used his gauntlets and boots to smash handholds in the fortress walls, and gained access through a wide-mouthed heat exchange venting tunnel. The flames were industrial—true fire, rather than the corrosive, clinging nightmare of a flame weapon’s breath—and he walked through the thrashing orange heat with impunity, letting it scorch his armour and the skulls that hung from it.
Of his brothers’ fates, he had no idea.
True stealth had never been a viable option for the assault’s first phase. The battle armour of a Legiones Astartes warrior hardly allowed for one to become a consummate, untraceable assassin, not while it growled as loud as an idling engine, rendered him close to three metres in height, and bled a power signature detectable to even the crudest auspex readers. When the Eighth Legion went to war, it wasn’t under a veil of secrecy and the flawed hope of going unseen. Leave such cowardly hunts to the soulless bitch-creatures spawned by the Callidus Temple in their gestation vats.
He flicked a glance at his retinal chron. Two minutes had passed since the sirens began their tumultuous whine. The prophet consulted an archived hololith schematic on his left eye lens as he ran in a crouch through the maintenance tunnel. A large chamber waited ahead, almost certainly the hub of Chapter serf operations on this level. Killing everyone present but for a few screaming, fleeing survivors would surely attract some attention.
Not far now.
Lucoryphus claimed no great ties to being his gene-sire’s favoured pet, nor did he care that other warriors lauded themselves as part of the primarch’s inner circle. Like most of his brethren, his perspectives aligned along a different route in the generations since Curze’s death. He was a Raptor, first and foremost, and a Bleeding Eye second. Thirdly, distantly, he was a Night Lord. He did not cast his Legion bond aside, but nor did he drape himself in icons of Nostramo’s winged skull.
It was just a planet, after all. A sizeable minority of the Legion weren’t even drawn from there. They were Terran, born on the Throneworld, descended directly from the bloodlines that begat the whole human race.
Vorasha was Earthborn, beneath the daemon-faced armour, the blood-weeping eyes, and the irritating cackles. This, too, meant nothing. Lucoryphus knew Vorasha thought as he did: Raptors first, Bleeding Eyes second, allegiance to the ancient Legions last. What was a birth world, anyway? Such details meant nothing. It maddened him to see others put so much stock in it; always, they looked to the past, refusing to face up to the glories of the present and conquests of the future.
The prophet was the worst of all. His grotesquely distorted perception of the primarch soured Lucoryphus’ stomach. Curze killed because Curze wished to kill. His was a rotten soul. In death’s vindication, he taught his idiotic lesson: that the evils of the species deserve to be destroyed.
The Raptor gave a grating cackle each time he thought of it. If the lesson was so vital, so pure, so necessary, why did Curze leave a Legion of murderers sailing the stars in his name? He died a broken thing, a husk of himself, with hatred the only emotion strong enough to pierce his own confusion. He died to teach a lesson to a father already slain; he died to show a truth that every soul in the empire already knew. That was not vindication, it was stupidity. Proud, blind, and deluded.
Primarchs. He wanted to spit at the thought of them. Useless, flawed creatures. Let the dead ones decay in poetic scripture throughout history’s pages. Let those that survived dwell in the highest eyries of the immaterium, singing the ethereal praises of mad gods. He had a war to win, unshackled to failures from a time of legend.
The Exalted had asked much from him, and Lucoryphus willingly pledged a blood oath promising success. To be one of the Bleeding Eyes was a sacred bond; they were a populous brotherhood, spread across several sectors and allied to countless warbands. Lucoryphus prided his warriors’ reputations among the best and brightest of the splintered cult. He led thirty of them, and many of those were insufferable wretches who’d claw his throat out if they believed they could take his place, but when blood called, they answered as a pack.
The labyrinth of maintenance tunnels hollowed through Vilamus had been built for teams of servitors to march through to fulfil their myriad repair functions. These, he crawled through with ease, a loping leopard’s pace, claws hammering into the metal. He cared nothing for the noise he was making. Let the enemy come. Unlike the Claws, bound to the earth and forced to ascend slowly, every single one of the Bleeding Eyes had ascended to Vilamus’ middle levels, riding the winds with their jetpacks before gaining entrance.
With the thrusters on his back, Lucoryphus was denied access to the smaller ventilation ducts, so his routes were limited. Caution was still a factor, as was his intended destination. A flickering schematic layout of the fortress overlaid his right eye, refocusing and turning as he rose through the monastery’s levels. Frequently, the image would dissolve into a worthless wash of static, leaving the Raptor sneering irritated growls through his vox-caster speakers. They, at least, hadn’t failed, but the coronal storm played havoc without regard for its victims’ allegiances.
The sirens had been ringing for several minutes. Presumably, one of the Claws on the lower levels was beginning to enjoy themselves. Lucoryphus loped on, sloping facemask snarling left and right at the ornate gothic architecture. Even these access tunnels were wrought with an obscene amount of dedication and craftsmanship.
He ceased all movement. Dead still, he waited, muscles tensed. The only sound for several seconds was the beat of his primary heart and the ventilating rhythm of his breath. But there, at the edge of hearing…
He broke into a feral run, lamenting this undignified crawl and aching for the chance to soar. At the end of the tunnel awaited ligh
t, voices, and the sweat-stink of human flesh…
Prey.
Lucoryphus launched from the tunnel mouth, crashing through the thin iron grating with a condor’s cry. They’d heard him coming—he’d made sure of it—and stood ready with their useless weapons clutched in steady hands. No fear in these ardent defenders, none at all, and why would there be? What had ever frightened them in the entire span of their threatless lives at the heart of this impregnable bastion? Fear was something they needed to be taught.
Las-fire scorched his armour with meaningless kisses, but the Raptor twisted as he fell, keeping his vulnerable armour joints protected. The ground shook with his landing, all four claws birthing cracks in the stone beneath his weight. In the span of two seconds, he’d taken another three las-round kicks against his pauldrons and tracked all four of the robed defenders, retinal targeting locks signalling the types of weapons in their grips, and giving dull-sensed representations of the humans’ heart rates.
Lucoryphus took in their distance at the same moment all of these details flickered over his eyeballs. The humans were too far away for an efficient leap and an easy kill.
Irritating.
He turned to the wall, jumping as his engines fired—his posture betraying nothing of humanity, closer resembling the splay-limbed leap of a house lizard. He hit the wall with his hands and feet, sticking there for a moment in a parody of saurian inelegance. Then he was moving, muscles burning, joints growling. Claws and talons cracked into the stone as he climbed, his jerky reptile-scramble carrying him away from the enemy fire below. Once he’d clawed high enough, he kicked off from the ornate stonework, letting gravity and the weight of his armour bring him back down.
Better.
The Raptor plummeted, shrieking from his helm’s vocalisers, outstretched claws still smeared with rock dust.
Though inexperienced, the serfs weren’t devoid of training. Pride and devotion carried them, keeping their lasrifles firing, while lesser—or less-indoctrinated—souls might otherwise run. Lucoryphus was a great admirer of courage and the things it could achieve in those rare moments where fate and the human spirit met to create something unique. In most cases, bravery did little more than end lives several seconds quicker than cowardice. If the white-robed serfs had run, he’d have needed to give chase. Instead, they stood their ground and died for it. Quick deaths, but none of them painless.
[Night Lords 02] - Blood Reaver Page 24