02 - Blood Reaver

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

  Uzas, ever devoid of grace, had hurled himself at the closest of the enemy, and was doing his level best to punch his gladius through the other warrior’s soft throat armour. All the while, he screamed a meaningless screed of syllables into the warrior’s faceplate, giving voice to mindless hate. His armour wept fluid from a thousand cracks, but he rammed the short blade home with a howl. The Branded warrior jerked, polluting the vox with his gargling. Uzas laughed as he sawed ineffectively, his sword grating against the dying Night Lord’s spine without severing it. A flatline chimed through everyone’s helm receptors.

  —Sarlath, Third Claw, Vital Signs Lost—

  “Blades!” Dal Karus called to his surviving brothers.

  Talos ran for him, the Blade of Angels swinging with a trail of crackling force streaming behind. Their swords crashed together, locking fast, neither one of them giving ground. Both warriors spoke through the breathy grunts of painful exertion. “Foolish… to use… bolters…” Talos grinned behind his faceplate.

  “It… was a risk… I admit,” Dal Karus grunted back. The grinding teeth of his chainsword clicked and ticked as they tried to whirr against the golden weapon it parried. Garius’ blood spat and popped as it burned dry on Talos’ energised blade.

  —Vel Shan, Third Claw, Vital Signs Lost—

  Talos couldn’t see how the kill was made, but he heard Xarl give a roar over the whine of another flatline. He doubled his effort, leaning harder into the struggle, but his damaged armour was betraying his strength. As his muscles burned, his retinal display flickered twice. Power was flashing erratically through his armour systems, and it was all he could do to keep his blade locked to Dal Karus’. He felt the unwelcome drag of his arms growing heavier. A spray of sparks spat from a rent in his back-mounted power pack.

  “You are weakening,” his enemy growled.

  “And you… are outnumbered,” Talos grinned back.

  Dal Karus broke the lock, disengaging savagely enough to send the prophet stumbling backwards. The chainsword skidded across Talos’ sundered chestplate, scratching the defiled aquila emblazoned there. With a curse at his overbalanced swing, Dal Karus did all he could to ignore the flatline chiming—a stream of tinnitus proclaiming the deaths of his brothers.

  He moved back, sword up to guard against… against…

  Against all of them. Against all of First Claw.

  They stood as a pack, surrounded by the bodies of those they’d slain. In the clearing haze, Talos, Xarl, Uzas, Cyrion and Mercutian stood with bloodied blades in their fists. Their armour was shattered into ruin, and for the briefest moment of empathy, Dal Karus envisioned the amount of labour involved in repairing such punishment. Talos and Xarl stood shredded by gunfire, their armour plating ripped away and the underlayers blackened, punctured and burned. Their helms were dented to the point of malformation. Xarl was missing an eye lens, and both of Cyrion’s were cracked beyond easy repair. Half of Uzas’ features were visible through his broken faceplate. The leader of the Branded, the last soul to hold the title, locked eyes with the smirking, drooling fool.

  “This is your fault,” Dal Karus said. “Your madness has cost us every life taken this night.”

  Uzas licked teeth made dark by bleeding gums. Dal Karus doubted the beast even understood his words.

  “Let’s finish this.” He set the teeth of his chainblade whirring again, chewing air. “Do not dishonour Third Claw by making me wait for my death.”

  Cyrion’s laughter broke out, stripped raw by his vox-speakers. “Dishonour,” he wheezed the word through chuckles. “A moment, please.” He disengaged the seals at his collar, removing his scarred helm and wiping his eyes on a deed-parchment he tore from his armour. “Honour, he says, as if it matters. These words from a warrior who was a murderer at thirteen, and a rapist two years later. Now he cares about honour. That’s beautiful.”

  Talos raised his bolter. The double-barrelled weapon was engraved with the deeds of a fallen warrior who’d achieved so much more than any of those in its new wielder’s presence.

  “Please,” Dal Karus sighed, “do not execute me with Malcharion’s weapon.”

  “Remove your helm.” The prophet didn’t move as he spoke. Sparks and lubricating oils still flicked and dripped from the wounds in his war plate. “You surrendered any right to choose your death the moment you forced this idiotic confrontation.”

  Slowly, Dal Karus complied. Bareheaded, he faced First Claw. The deck smelled of blood’s spicy scent, thinned by the chemical reek of bolter shell detonations. He offered a rueful smile, almost an apology.

  “Why didn’t you just kill Uzas?” he asked. “It would have ended this before it began.”

  “You are not foolish enough to truly believe that,” Talos spoke softly, “and neither am I. This, as with all things in the Legion, is a wound torn open by revenge.”

  “I wish to join First Claw.”

  “Then you should not have come against us in midnight clad.” He kept his aim at Dal Karus’ face. “If you cannot dissuade your own squad from petty vengeance that costs loyal lives, what use are you to the remnants of the Legion?”

  “You cannot control Uzas. Is there a difference? Are your lives worth so much more than ours?”

  “Evidently they are,” Talos replied, “because we are the ones with our guns to your face, Dal Karus.”

  “Talos, I—”

  Both barrels bellowed. Tiny gobbets of meat with wet fragments of skull clattered across the walls and against their armour. Headless, the body toppled, crashing against the corridor wall before sliding down, slumping in crooked, graceless repose.

  They stood without speaking a word to one another for some time. Savaged armour sparked and made unwelcome joint-grinding sounds as they lingered in the slaughter they’d created.

  At last, it was Talos who broke the stillness. He gestured at the bodies.

  “Drag them. Septimus will strip their armour.”

  “Two months.”

  Talos laughed. “Please do not joke with me, Septimus. I am not in the mood.”

  The human slave scratched his cheek where the polished metal met pale skin, as he stared at the carnage strewn across his workshop. The seven corpses, with their armour suffering only minimal damage—they could be stripped and the meat flushed into the void within a day. But all five members of First Claw were barely able to stand with the damage done to their war plate. Oil and lubricant ran in drying stains from cracked-open punctures. Dents needed to be beaten out, mangled ceramite had to be cut free and completely replaced, torn layers of composite metals needed to be resealed, repainted, reformed…

  And the subdermal damage was even worse. False musculature made of fibre-bundle cables needed to be reworked, rethreaded and rebuilt. Joint servos and gears had to be replaced or repaired. Stimulant injectors needed sterilising and reconstructing. Interface ports had to be completely retuned, and all of that was before the most complicated repairs were undertaken: the sensory systems in each helm’s retinal display.

  “I’m not joking, master. Even using these parts as salvage, it will take more than a week for each suit of armour. Recoding their systems, rebuilding them to your bodies, retuning their interfaces to each of you… I cannot do it faster than that. I’m not sure anyone could.”

  Cyrion stepped forward. A misfiring stabiliser in his left leg gave him a dragging limp, while his own features were cracked and bleeding.

  “And if you worked on only mine and your master’s?”

  Septimus swallowed, careful to avoid Uzas’ stare. “Two weeks, Lord Cyrion. Perhaps three.”

  “Mortal. Fix mine.” All eyes turned to Uzas. He snorted at them. “What? I need my armour tended to, the same as each of you,” he said.

  Talos disengaged his helm’s seals with a snake’s hiss of vented air pressure. Removing the mangled ceramite took three attempts, and the prophet’s face was a bruised and bloody painting of varied wounds. One of his eyes was crusted closed by a foul-look
ing scab, and the other glared, clean and black, devoid of an iris like all of the Nostramo-born.

  “Firstly, do not address my artificer—and our pilot—as if he were a hygiene slave. Show some respect.” He paused to wipe his bloody lips on the back of his gauntlet. “Secondly, you bear the blame for putting us in these straits. Your urge to howl your way around the crew decks drinking the blood of mortals has removed us from being battle-ready for two months. Will you be the one to tell the Exalted he has lost two Claws in one night?”

  Uzas licked his teeth. “The Branded chose to face us. They should’ve walked away. Then they’d be alive.”

  “It is always so simple for you.” Talos narrowed the one eye that still worked. He filtered his tone through a last attempt at patience, seeking to keep the strain of his wounds from reaching his lips. “What madness infests your mind? What makes you incapable of understanding what you have cost us tonight?”

  Uzas shrugged. The bloody handprint painted onto his faceplate was all the expression he showed to them. “We won, didn’t we? Nothing else matters.”

  “Enough,” Cyrion shook his head, resting a cracked gauntlet on Talos’ shoulder guard. “It’s like trying to teach a corpse to breathe. Give up, brother.”

  Talos moved away from Cyrion’s placating hand. “There will come a night when the word brother is no longer enough to save you, Uzas.”

  “Is that a prophecy, seer?” the other warrior grinned.

  “Smile all you like, but remember these words. When that night comes, I will kill you myself.”

  Each of them tensed as the door’s chime sounded. “Who comes?” Talos called. He had to blink to clear his blurring vision. The wounds he’d taken weren’t healing with the alacrity he’d expected, and he had the grating sense that the damage beneath his armour was worse than he’d first thought.

  A fist thumped against the door three times. “Soul Hunter,” the voice on the other side crackled by way of greeting. Its tone was surprisingly rich with respect, despite being as harsh and dry as a vulture’s caw. “We must speak, Soul Hunter. So very much to speak of.”

  “Lucoryphus,” Talos lowered his blade, “of the Bleeding Eyes.”

  VI

  HONOUR THY FATHER

  Lucoryphus entered the chamber in a bestial stalk, prowling on all fours. His feet, sheathed in ceramite boots, were warped into armoured claws: curling, multi-jointed and wickedly bladed, no different from a hawk’s talons. Walking had been a bane to Lucoryphus for centuries—even this ungainly crawl was difficult—and the sloping thrusters mounted upon the warrior’s back spoke of denied flight, a Legionary caged by the confines of these corridors.

  His eyes bled, and from this curse he took his name. Upon the white faceplate, twin scarlet tear-trails ran from the slanted eye lenses. Lucoryphus of the Bleeding Eyes, with his avian helm twisted into a daemon’s visage mouthing a silent scream, watched with a predator’s eyes. Machine-growls sounded in his cabled neck joints as the warrior’s muscles tensed with unintentional tics. He regarded each of the gathered Night Lords in turn, the avian helm snapping left and right with an eye for prey.

  He’d been like them once. Oh, yes. Just like them.

  His armour bore little evidence of allegiance to his Legion or bloodline. Each of his warriors displayed their bond the same way: each bore the red tears of their leader reflected on their own faceplates. The Bleeding Eyes were a cult unto themselves first, and sons of the Eighth Legion second. Talos wondered where the rest of them were at the moment. They represented fully half of the additional strength the Exalted’s warband had taken on from recovering Halasker’s companies on Crythe.

  “The Exalted sends me to you.” Lucoryphus’ voice made words from the sound of fingernails scratching down sandpaper. “The Exalted is wrathful.”

  “The Exalted is seldom ever anything else,” Talos pointed out.

  “The Exalted,” Lucoryphus paused to hiss air in through his jagged mouth grille, “is wrathful with First Claw.”

  Cyrion snorted. “That’s not exactly a unique occurrence, either.”

  Lucoryphus gave an irritated bark of noise, not far from a falcon’s shriek, but flawed by vox corruption. “Soul Hunter. The Exalted requests your presence. In the apothecarion.”

  Talos placed his helm on the workshop table before Septimus. The mortal didn’t disguise his sigh as he started turning it over in his hands.

  “Soul Hunter,” Lucoryphus grated again. “The Exalted requests your presence. Now.”

  With his face marred by the wounds he’d suffered only an hour before, Talos stood motionless. He towered above the hunched Raptor, in armour devastated by his brothers’ recent revenge. On his back, the golden blade stolen from the Blood Angels reflected what little light existed in the artificer’s chamber. On his hip, clamped by magnetic seals, rested the massive double-barrelled bolter of an Eighth Legion hero.

  By contrast, Lucoryphus of the Bleeding Eyes had come unarmed. A curious gesture from the Exalted.

  “The Exalted requested,” Talos smiled, “or demanded?”

  Lucoryphus twitched with an involuntary muscle spasm. His avian head jerked, and the daemonic faceplate released a hissing breath. His left talon-hand snapped shut, the clawed fist trembling. When the fingers unlocked, they curled open on squealing metal joints.

  “Requested.”

  “First time for everything,” said Cyrion.

  The Exalted licked its teeth.

  It still wore its armour for the most part, though the ceramite plating had long since become part of its altered flesh. The apothecarion was expansive, but the Exalted’s nature forced it into an uncomfortable hunch to avoid scraping its horned helm across the ceiling. All around it was silence—the silence of abandonment. This chamber hadn’t seen any real use in many years. As the Exalted stroked a taloned finger across a surgical table, he reflected how the decades of neglect would soon be undone.

  The creature moved over to the cryogenic vault. A wall of sealed glass cylinders, all racked and stored in perfect order, each etched in Nostraman with the names of the fallen. The Exalted growled low, a tormented breath, as its knife-like digits scratched squealing streaks down the metal vault racks. So many names. So very many.

  It closed its eyes and listened, for a time, to the Covenant’s heartbeat. The Exalted breathed in unison with the distant rhythmic thrum of the fusion reactors, rumbling as the engines idled in dock. It listened to the whispers, the screams, the shouts and the blood-borne pulses of everyone on board. All of it echoed through the hull into the creature’s mind—a constant sensory tide that took more and more effort to ignore as the years passed.

  Rarely, it would hear laughter, almost always from the mortals as they endured their dim, dull existences within the ship’s black bowels. The Exalted was no longer sure how to react to the sound, nor what it could really signify. The Covenant was the creature’s fortress, a monument to both its own pain and the pain it inflicted upon its grandfather’s galaxy. Laughter was a sound that pulled at the Exalted, incapable of dredging any true memories, yet still whispering that, once, the creature would have understood such a sound. It would’ve made the sound itself, in the age when “It” had been “Him”.

  Its lips peeled back from its shark’s teeth in a grin it didn’t feel. How times changed. And soon, they would change again.

  Talos. Lucoryphus. The knowledge of their presence didn’t come in simple recognition of their names. It was their thoughts drifting closer, bunched tight like fused writing and polluted by fragments of their personalities. Their approach came upon the Exalted like a whispering, unseen tide. The creature turned a moment before the apothecarion’s doors opened on protesting gears.

  Lucoryphus inclined his head. The Raptor stalked in on all fours, the sloping thrusters on its back shifting side to side in sympathy with the warrior’s awkward gait. Talos didn’t bother to salute. He didn’t even acknowledge the Exalted with a nod. Instead, the prophet entered slowly,
his armour a mauled palette of absolute ruination, and his face little better.

  “What do you want?” he asked. One of his eyes was buried beneath strips of torn pale skin and weeping scabs. His head was laid open to the bone, and the flesh was scorched and angry. Damage from a bolter shell, and one that had almost killed him. Interesting.

  Despite the prophet’s typical undignified defiance, the Exalted felt a moment’s gratitude that Talos had come in such a condition.

  “You are wounded,” it pointed out, its voice a draconic murmur. “I can hear your hearts labouring to beat. The blood-stink… the mushy, liquid concussion of overstrained organs… Talos, you are closer to death than you appear. And yet you come before me now. I appreciate your display of trust.”

  “Third Claw is dead.” The prophet spoke as bluntly as always. “First Claw is crippled. We need two months to recover.”

  The Exalted inclined its tusked head in acknowledgement. It knew these things already, of course, but the fact the prophet reported it like an obedient soldier was enough to work with. For now.

  “Who broke your face?”

  “Dal Karus.”

  “And how did Dal Karus die?”

  Talos moved his hand from the great puncture wound in his side. The gauntlet came away coated in a sheen of blood. “He died begging for mercy.”

  Lucoryphus, hunched atop one of the surgical tables, emitted a shrieking snicker from his vocalisers. The Exalted grunted before speaking. “Then we are stronger without him. Did you harvest Third Claw’s gene-seed?”

  The prophet wiped spittle from his lips. “I had servitors store the bodies in the cryo-vaults. I will harvest them later, when we have a greater supply of preservative solution.”

  The Exalted turned its gaze upon the mortuary vaults: a row of lockers built into the far wall.

  “Very well.”

  Talos didn’t hide his wince as he took a breath. The pain of his wounds, the Exalted suspected, must border on excruciating. This, too, was interesting. Talos had not come out of obedience. Even grievously injured, he had come because of the location the Exalted had chosen. Curiosity could motivate even the most stubborn souls. There could be no other answer.