“Twenty-six revolutions.”
“Are you too old to take the trials?”
She kissed his forehead before she spoke. Suddenly she was smiling, and the tension in the small room evaporated. “I can’t take the trials. I’m a girl. And you won’t be able to take them if you’re just like your father was.”
“But the Legion takes boys from the gangs all the time.”
“It didn’t always.” She lifted him away, and returned to stirring the noodles in the pan. “Remember, it takes some boys from the gangs. But it’s always looking for the best and brightest stars. Promise me you’ll be one of those?”
“Yes, mother.”
“No more silence in tuition?”
“No, mother.”
“Good. How is your friend?”
“He’s not really my friend, you know. He’s always angry. And he wants to join a gang when he’s older.”
His mother gave him another smile, though it was sadder, seeming like a wordless lie. “Everyone gets into a gang, my little scholar. It’s just one of those things. Everyone has a house, a gang, a job. Just remember, there’s a difference between doing something because you have to, and doing it because you enjoy it.”
She placed their dinner onto the small table, her pale hands in little gloves to keep them from being burned on the tin bowls. Afterwards, she tossed the gloves on the bed, and smiled as he ate his first mouthful.
He looked up at her, seeing her face change in stuttering, flickering jerks. Her smile warped into a twisted sneer as her eyes tilted, pulled tighter, slanting with inhuman elegance towards her temples. Her wet hair rose as if charged by static, cresting into a stiffened plume of arterial red.
She screamed at him, a piercing shriek that shattered the windows, sending glass bursting out to rain down onto the street far below. The shrieking maiden reached for a curved blade on the nearby bed, and—
He opened his eyes to the comforting darkness of his meditation chamber.
But the solace lasted no more than a moment. The alien witch had come through, following him back to the waking world. She said his name, her feminine voice breaking the black silence, her scent carried with her movements on the stale shipboard air.
The warrior reached for her throat, huge fist clutching the pale woman’s neck as he rose to his feet and carried her with him. Her boots dangled and kicked in weak resistance, while her mouth worked without air to fuel her voice.
Talos released her. She fell a metre, crashing to the deck on boneless legs, falling to her hands and knees.
“Octavia.”
She coughed, spitting and catching her breath. “No, really, who did you think it was?”
By the open doorway leading into his meditation chamber, one of the Navigator’s attendants stood hunched and squirming, a scrap-metal shotgun in his trembling, bandaged hands.
“Need I remind you,” the Night Lord said, “that it is a violation of Covenant law to aim that weapon at one of the Legion.”
“You hurt my mistress.” The man somehow stared with blinded eyes, his aim unwavering despite his obvious fear. “You hurt her.”
Talos knelt down, offering his hand to help Octavia rise. She took it, but not before a moment’s hesitation.
“I see you inspire great loyalty in your attendants. Etrigius never did.”
Octavia touched her throat, feeling the rawness there. “It’s fine, Hound. It’s fine, don’t worry.” The attendant lowered his gun, returning it beneath the ragged folds of his filthy cloak. The Navigator puffed a loose lock of hair from her face. “What did I do to deserve that welcome? You said I could enter if the door was unlocked.”
“Nothing,” Talos returned to the slab of cold metal he used as a repose couch. “Forgive me; I was troubled by something I saw in my dreams.”
“I knocked first,” she added.
“I am sure you did.” For a moment, he pressed his palms to his eyes, wiping away the after-images of the alien witch. The pain remained, undeniably worse than it had been in past years. His pulse thudded along the side of his head, the pain cobwebbing out from his temple. The injuries earned only a month before had done nothing but fuel the pain’s growth. Now it hurt even to dream.
Slowly, he raised his head to look at her. “You are not in your chambers. The ship is blessedly free from that horrendous shaking, as well. We cannot possibly have arrived already.”
Her reluctance to dwell on the topic was crystal clear. “No,” she said, and left it at that.
“I see.” She required another rest, then. The Exalted would be less than thrilled. The three of them shared the silence, during which she flashed her lamp pack around the walls of his personal chamber. Nostraman writing, the flowing runes raggedly drawn, covered every surface. In some places, new prophecies overwrote older ones. Here was the prophet’s mind, spilled onto the metal walls, scrawled in a dead language. Similar runic prophecy was carved over patches of his armour.
Talos seemed unconcerned with her scrutiny. “You look unwell,” he said to her.
“Thank you very much.” She was well aware how sick she looked. Pasty skin and a sore back, with eyes so bloodshot and sore it hurt to blink. “It isn’t easy to fly a ship through psychic hell, you know.”
“I meant no offence.” He seemed more thoughtful than apologetic. “The pleasantries go first, I think. The ability to make small talk. We lose that before anything else, when we leave our humanity behind.”
Octavia snorted, but she wouldn’t be distracted. “What was your nightmare about?”
Talos smiled at her, the same crooked smirk usually hidden by his helm. “The eldar. Recently, it is nothing but the eldar.”
“Was it prophecy?” She rebound her ponytail, checking her bandana was still tight.
“I am no longer sure. The difference between prophecy and nightmare isn’t always easy to perceive. This was a memory that became twisted and fouled towards the end. Neither a prophetic vision, nor a true dream.”
“You’d think you could tell the difference by now,” she said, not meeting his eyes.
He let her venom pass, knowing its source. She was afraid, rattled by his treatment of her upon awakening, and doing her best to mask the fear in condescending anger. Why humans let themselves become enslaved to such pettiness remained a mystery to him, but he could recognise it and acknowledge it, rendering it ignorable.
Encouraged by his tolerant silence, she said “Sorry,” at last. Now their eyes met—hers the hazel of so many Terran-born, his the iris-less black of all Nostramo’s sons. The gaze didn’t last long. Octavia felt her skin crawl if she stared too long at any of the Night Lords’ enhanced, proto-god features. Talos’ face had healed well in the last month, but he was still a weapon before he was a man. The skull beneath his delicate features was reinforced and disgustingly heavy: a brick of bone, hard as steel. Surgical scars, white on white, almost concealed by his pale skin, ran down from both of his temples. A face that would’ve been handsome on a man was somehow profane when worn by one of these towering warriors. Eyes that might have been curious and kind were actually disquieting, always seething with something rancid and unconcealed.
Hatred, she suspected. The masters hated everything with unending ferocity, even one another.
He smiled at her scrutiny. That, at least, was still human. A crooked smile: once worn by a boy who knew much more than he wished to say. For a moment, he was something beyond this scarred statue of a hateful god.
“I assume there was a purpose to this visit,” he said, not quite a question.
“Maybe. What were you dreaming about… before the eldar came?”
“My home world. Before we returned to destroy it.” He’d slept in his armour, all but for his helm. Septimus had repaired it with Maruc’s assistance, and Octavia had been present in the final moments, watching Talos re-breaking the aquila with a single ritual hammer blow.
“What was your family like?”
The warrior sheathed h
is golden blade in its scabbard, locking it to his back. The grip and winged crosspiece showed over his left shoulder, waiting to be drawn. He didn’t look at her as he answered.
“My father was a murderer, as was his father before him, and his father before that. My mother was an indentured whore who grew old before her time. At fifty, she looked closer to seventy. I suspect she was diseased.”
“Sorry I asked,” she said with feeling.
Talos checked the magazine in his massive bolter, crunching it home with a neat slap. “What do you want, Octavia?”
“Something Septimus told me once.”
He paused, turning to look down at her. She barely reached the base of his sternum. “Continue.”
“He said you killed one of your servants, a long time ago.”
“Tertius. The warp took hold of him.” Talos frowned, almost offended. “I killed him cleanly, and he suffered little. It was not a mindless murder, Octavia. I do not act without reason.”
She shook her head. “I know. It’s not that. But what happened? ‘The warp has a million ways to poison the human heart.’” She smiled, barely, at the ancient and melodramatic Navigator’s quote. “What happened to him?”
Talos locked his double-barrelled bolter to his armoured thigh plating. “Tertius changed inside and out. He was always a curious soul. He liked to stand on the observation deck when we plied the warp’s tides, staring out into the midst of madness. He looked into the abyss for long enough that it poured back into him. The signs were few at first—he would twitch and bleed from the nose—and I was younger then, I barely knew what to look for when it came to corruption. By the time I knew he was lost, he was a ravenous thing, crawling along the lower decks, hunting and eating the human crew.”
She shivered. Even the youngest Navigators knew the myriad degenerations that could take hold of humans in the warp, and despite her tedious career on Maiden of the Stars, Octavia had seen her fair share of taint in an unguarded crew. Nothing quite that bad, but still…
“And what happened to Secondus?” she asked.
“I have no desire to speak of the second. It is not something I recall with any pleasure, nor even any vindication when it was over.” He picked up his helm, turning it over in his hands. “Just tell me what’s wrong,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes. “How do you know something’s wrong?”
“Perhaps because I am not a complete fool.”
Octavia forced a smile. He could kill her; he would kill her, without a heartbeat’s hesitation.
Now or never, she thought.
“I keep seeing the Void-born.”
Talos breathed slowly, closing his eyes for several seconds. “Go on.”
“I hear her weeping around corridor corners. I catch glimpses of her running down empty passages. It’s her. I know it is. Hound hasn’t seen her, though.”
Her attendant gave a bashful shrug, not enjoying the Night Lord’s sudden scrutiny. Talos looked back to Octavia.
“So.” She tilted her head. “Am I tainted?”
When he answered, it was with a tolerant sigh. “You are nothing but trouble to me,” he said.
His words stoked the embers of her pride enough that she squared her shoulders, standing up straighter. “I could say the same thing to you. My life has hardly been any easier since you captured me. And you hunted me, remember? Dragging me on board with your hand around my throat, like some prize pet.”
Talos laughed at that—his laughter was always the barest chuckle, little more than a soft exhalation through a crooked smile.
“I will never grow tired of your bladed Terran tongue.” The warrior took a breath. “Guard yourself, Octavia. Despite your fears of your own weakness, the fault doesn’t lie with you. This ship has spent an age within the warp. The corruption is not within you, but the Covenant itself. Taint rides in its bones, and we all breathe it in with the air supply. We are heretics. Such is our fate.”
“That… is hardly reassuring.”
He gave her a look then, almost achingly human. A raised eyebrow, a half-smile, a look that said: Really, what did you expect from me?
“The Covenant hates me,” she said. “I know that. Its spirit recoils each time we touch. But it wouldn’t haunt me like this, not on purpose. Its soul is too simple to consider such a thing.”
Talos nodded. “Of course. But the Covenant is crewed by as many memories as living, breathing mortals. More have died on these decks than still work them. And the ship remembers every one of them. Think of all the blood soaked into the steel that surrounds us, and the hundreds of last breaths filtering through the ventilation cyclers. Forever recycled, breathed in and out of living lungs, over and over again. We walk within the Covenant’s memory, so we all see things at the edges of our vision from time to time.”
She shivered again. “I hate this ship.”
“No,” he said, holding his helm once more. “You don’t.”
“It’s nothing like I imagined, though. Guiding a Legiones Astartes warship—it’s what every Navigator prays for. And the Covenant moves like something from a dream, twisting and turning like a serpent in oil; nothing can compare to it. But everything here is so… sour.” Octavia’s words trailed off. After a moment, she watched him closely, smelling the tang of acid on his breath.
“You are staring,” he pointed out.
“You were lucky not to lose your eye.”
“That is a curious choice of words. Half of my skull was replaced by layered metal bonding, and I am reliably informed by Cyrion that the left side of my face looks like I lost a fight with a crag cougar.”
He stroked gauntleted fingertips down the sides of his face, where the scars of surgery were slowly fading. Even his post-human biology struggled to erase the damage done. The scars on the left side of his face ran from his temple to the edge of his lips. “These scars are not a mark of fine fortune, Octavia.”
“It’s not that bad,” she said. Something in his manner put her at ease—a touch of almost fraternal familiarity in his measured tone and honest eyes. “What’s a crag cougar?”
“A beast of my home world. When next you see one of the Atramentar, look to their shoulder guards. The roaring lions on their pauldrons are what we called crag cougars on Nostramo. It was considered a mark of wealth for gang bosses to be able to leave the cities and hunt such creatures.”
“Mistress,” Hound interrupted. She turned at the break in her history lesson.
“What?”
Hound looked awkward. “I killed a crag cat once.”
She tilted her head, but Talos answered before she could. “Hill Folk?” His low voice resonated in the chamber.
Hound nodded his ruined head with its crown of scraggly grey hair. “Yes, lord. And I killed a crag cat once. A small one. Then I ate it.”
“He probably did,” Talos conceded. “The Hill Folk lived away from the cities, eking out an existence in the mountains.”
Octavia was still watching Hound. “Just how old are you?”
“Older than you,” Hound confirmed, nodding again as if this answered everything. Bizarre little thing, she thought, turning back to Talos.
“How’s the arm?”
The warrior had glanced down at his armoured left arm, closing the hand into a fist. On the surface, encased in armour, it looked no different to his right limb. A different story lay beneath the ceramite: a limb of dense metal bones and hydraulic joints. The subtle grind of false muscles and servos was still new enough to be novel. He still felt a faint amusement at the vibration of small gears in his wrist or the crunching clicks when the plasteel elbow joint moved too fast. For her benefit, he offered his hand, tapping his thumb to his fingertips over and over in quick succession. Even the most subtle movements made his growling armour thrum.
“Cyrion lost his arm at Crythe,” he said. “I consider this an unfortunate thing to have in common with him.”
“How does it feel?”
“Like my own arm,”
he shrugged, “but less so.”
Despite herself, she felt a smile. “I see.”
“I believe I will speak with Deltrian regarding the repairs,” he said. “Do you wish to join me?”
“Not at all, thank you.”
“No,” Hound piped up, still lurking by the door. “No, sir.”
Vox-speakers across the ship crackled to life. The Exalted’s bass drawl rumbled through the corridors, “Translation into the empyrean in thirty rotations. All crew to their stations.”
Octavia looked up at the speaker mounted on the wall. “A polite way of saying, ‘Octavia, get back to your room.’”
Talos nodded. “Return to your chamber, Navigator. Watch for the ghosts that walk these halls, but pay them no heed. How far are we from our destination?”
“A day from the Maelstrom’s edge,” she said. “Maybe two. There’s one more thing.”
“Which is?”
“The Void-born’s father. Septimus told me not to trouble you with this, but I think you should know.”
Talos inclined his head for her to continue, but said nothing.
“Sometimes in Blackmarket, and elsewhere on the crew decks, he tells us all how the ship is damned, cursed to kill us all in the coming nights. Some of the older crew have been listening and agreeing for a while… You know how they were about the girl. But now the new crew, the Ganges crew, they’re starting to listen. Arkiah blames you. The girl had your Legion medallion, and she still… you know.”
“Died.”
Octavia nodded.
“I told Septimus to deal with this,” the warrior intoned. “But thank you for bringing it to my attention. I will end the situation myself.”
“Will you kill him?”
He wasn’t deaf to the hesitation in her voice. “Dead slaves are worthless,” he said. “However, so are disobedient ones. I will kill him if he forces my hand, but I have no wish to end his life. He is an example of human resistance to corruption, for he was able to sire a child despite decades of life in the bowels of this ship. I am not an idiot, Octavia. He is as much an example as his daughter was. His murder would profit us little, and serve only to antagonise the mortal crew. They must be brought to obey through fear of the consequences, not crushed into obedience by hopeless depression. The former breeds motivated, willing workers who wish to survive. The latter breeds suicidal husks that care nothing for pleasing their masters.”
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