Night Lords Omnibus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘So I have heard.’

  ‘They are precious to me, and vital to my plans. I take great heed of their words.’

  ‘So I have also heard.’

  ‘Indeed.’ The hateful smile came again. ‘I wonder to myself, where do you fit in? Are you content with the existence your Legion offers you? Do they respect your gift for what it is?’

  And then it was clear: he knew what this was about. How alarmingly unsubtle…

  The Night Lord suppressed a growl of anger, eyes narrowed on the flickering threat rune that still played across his visor display. His armour’s systems tracked his rising heartbeat and, suspecting battle, flooded his veins with potent chemical stimulants. It took several moments for Talos to exhale a shivering breath and speak, ignoring the burn of his energised muscles.

  ‘I am a breed apart from the creatures you call sorcerers, sir.’

  Abaddon ceased his vague pacing, looking at his reflection in the silver sheen of his claws. ‘You think I do not detect the disapproval in your tone?’

  ‘Evidently not, my lord. It is disgust, not merely disapproval.’

  Now Abaddon looked to him, the claws of his relic Talon slicing the air in silent, slow strokes by his side. It almost seemed a habit of his, the way a bored man might crack his knuckles. The Despoiler’s claws were always in motion, always cutting, even if it was just air.

  ‘You insult me, Night Lord,’ Abaddon mused, still smiling.

  ‘I cannot change the heart of my Legion, Warmaster. I am as you name me: a Night Lord. I am no warp-touched sorcerer, or fallen weaver of spells. I share the gene-seed of the Night Haunter. From my father – not the Ruinous Powers – did I inherit this… gift.’

  ‘Your honesty is refreshing.’

  ‘I am surprised you think so, Warmaster.’

  ‘Talos,’ Abaddon said, facing the Night Lord once more. ‘Another Black Crusade is in the making.’ Here he paused, holding up his claw, and Talos was forcibly reminded of a painting he had once seen of Horus, clutching a burning world in that same gauntlet. He’d assumed, at the time, the world was supposed to be Terra. Ironic then that the painting depicted Horus’s ultimate failure – in his grip burned the one world he couldn’t conquer.

  ‘This time…’ the Warmaster closed his unnatural eyes, and the silver talons trembled, ‘…this time, the fortress worlds around the Cadian Gate will burn until their surface is nothing but an ashen memory. This time, Cadia itself will die.’

  Talos watched the Warmaster, saying nothing, until his self-absorbed ecstasy faded and he opened his eyes once more. The Night Lord broke the silence that stretched between them by walking to the corpse of an inmate and kneeling by the body. The man had bled a great deal across the remains of the table he lay upon, but had died from the intense blunt trauma to the side of his head. Talos dipped his first two fingers in the congealing puddle of the mortal’s blood, raising them to his speaker grille in order to inhale the coppery scent.

  He hungered to taste it, to let the life matter flow through his gene-enhanced form and absorb it into his veins, so he might sense a ghostly echo of the man’s dreams, his fears, his desires and terrors.

  The wonders of Astartes physiology – to taste the life of those whose blood you have shed. Truly, a hunter’s gift.

  ‘You seem unimpressed by my assurance,’ the Warmaster said.

  ‘With respect, sir, all of your previous crusades have failed.’

  ‘Is that so? Are you one of my inner circle, to judge whether my plans came to pass and my objectives were met?’

  Talos flexed his hand, the gauntlet that would soon be replaced by sections from Faroven’s armour. ‘You do harm to the Imperium, but never truly advance our cause. Are you asking if the Night Lords will stand with you as you attack Cadia? I cannot speak for my Legion in its entirety. The Exalted will follow you, as he always does. I’m sure many more of our leaders will do the same.’

  Abaddon nodded as if this confirmed his point, the veins under his cheeks darkening as he grinned.

  ‘You speak of disunity. Your Legion lacks a figurehead.’

  ‘Many claim to be the Night Haunter’s heir. The Talonmaster has vanished, but his claim was no stronger than any other, even with his possession of one of our symbolic relics. Too many other leaders have similar items once carried by our father. Captain Acerbus leads the largest coalition of companies, but again, his insistence reeks of desperation and need. No true claimant has come forth, as you did with your Legion. Our father’s throne sits empty.’

  ‘Again, I hear the disquiet in your words.’

  ‘I am not hiding it, Warmaster.’

  ‘Admirable. So tell me: does your heart not cry out to take that throne yourself?’

  Talos froze. He hadn’t expected this. He’d suspected the Warmaster would seek to use his curse in some way, perhaps even drawing him into the ranks of the Black Legion as a pet advisor. But this…

  This was new. And, he suspected, it was a bluff designed to throw his thoughts into disparity.

  ‘No,’ he replied.

  ‘You hesitated.’

  ‘You asked a difficult question.’

  Abaddon walked closer to Talos, his boots crushing debris beneath each thundering tread. The helms and human skulls impaled upon the trophy racks rattled together, birthing a clacking melody like some barbarous musical instrument.

  Threat, the rune flickered, and the Night Lord looked through his red vision at the Warmaster no more than ten metres distant. He couldn’t help but compare him to the original bearer of the title. Horus, beloved son of the Emperor, Lord of the Eighteen Legions. Talos had only seen the First Warmaster once, but it was a moment of devastating potency in the storm of his memory.

  ‘I saw the First Warmaster once,’ he voiced aloud, without meaning to.

  Abaddon chuckled, a series of throaty, predatory grunts. ‘Where?’

  ‘Darrowmar. We fought alongside the Luna Wolves in the capital city.’

  ‘The Luna Wolves.’ Abaddon openly sneered at the use of his Legion’s first name, before they’d become the Sons of Horus in honour of their primarch, and long before they’d become the Black Legion to expunge the shame of their father’s failure. ‘Days of blindness and war based upon the darkest of lies.’

  ‘True. But they were days of unity,’ Talos said, recalling the majesty of Horus at the head of his Legion, his armour of grey-white polished to a finish of ivory and pearl. He was human, but… more. Astartes… but more. Contained within the First Primarch was all that was great and glorious within humanity, distilled to perfection by the fleshsmiths and geneweavers of the Emperor’s hidden fortress-laboratories.

  To stand within his sight was to bathe in light, to be flooded by inspiration more vital and real than the stinging chemicals pumping through Astartes blood. In his eye-aching brilliance, Horus drew everything to him – merely by taking the field, he ensured he was the fulcrum upon which everything spun. He became the heart of the battle, a maelstrom of slaughter, untouched by the mud and the blood of the battlefield even as he reaped the lives of the foe.

  And Talos had barely seen him. He’d formed his opinion of the living god from the other side of a cityscape battleground, seeing little more than the juddering images allowed by his helm’s zoomed vision as he sought to assess the Luna Wolves’ front lines. It had been like glancing at a moving painting of an ancient hero.

  He looked at Abaddon. How times change.

  ‘What do you recall of Warmaster Horus?’ Abaddon asked.

  ‘My eyes hurt in his presence, even from a distance,’ Talos said. ‘I am Nostramo-born,’ he added, knowing that would explain everything.

  ‘You Night Lords. So literal.’ The thought seemed to entertain him, which struck Talos as petty beyond belief. Clarity came upon him in that moment. Abaddon was an avatar for what the Traitor Legions had become. Talos watched him now, knowing neither of them were the equals of their primarch progenitors. None of the Legions could
make that claim. They were all mere shadows of their fathers, and their fathers had failed.

  The thought was a humbling one, and the weak claws of melancholy reached for his conscious mind again. These encroaching thoughts he dismissed with a scowl, refocusing his attention by acquiring target locks on the weakest points of Abaddon’s armour plating. Precious few existed, but he felt his armour’s machine-spirit responding, awakening again, teased back into anger. It helped him focus.

  ‘You have still not stated your reasons for summoning me, Warmaster.’

  ‘I will be blunt, then. After all, we have a crusade to forge in the coming days. Tell me, prophet, have you seen anything of the Crythe War in your recent visions?’

  ‘No,’ lied Talos immediately.

  ‘No.’ The Warmaster narrowed his eyes. ‘Just… “No”. How very declarative.’

  ‘I have seen nothing that will help you plan, nothing that will bring you new information or aid in any way.’

  ‘But you have seen something.’

  ‘Nothing you have any right to know.’

  The claws chimed quietly as they clanged together, Abaddon closing and opening his gauntlet just once. ‘I am not famous for my patience,’ he said slowly, his voice ripe with threat. ‘But it is enough that my suspicions are confirmed. You are a seer, and you have seen what will come.’

  ‘You seem to care a great deal about my visions. I thought you had sorcerers of your own.’ A streak of amused pride coloured his words. Abaddon didn’t seem to notice, or to care if he did.

  ‘They are having difficulty piercing the warp’s veil. You, evidently, have done what they cannot. You have witnessed the future. It should not surprise you that a commander would wish dearly for such information.’

  Talos said nothing, knowing what this was building up to.

  ‘Talos, my brother. I have an offer for you.’

  ‘I refuse. I thank you for the honour of whatever this offer might have been, but my answer is no.’

  ‘Why so blatant a refusal?’ Abaddon scowled now, the first time he had, and the grimace revealed filthy, blackened teeth behind his bluish lips.

  ‘If you are offering me the chance to lead the VIII Legion, I refuse because it is an impossible task, and not one within your power to grant. If you are asking me to leave my Legion, I refuse because I have no interest in doing so.’

  ‘You reject my offer without hearing it.’

  ‘Your offer will not be in my interests. There is little of any Legion in what remains to us, Warmaster. I no longer believe we will be the death of the Imperium. I no longer believe we are true to our fathers. Corruption has its claws deep within many of us.’

  ‘Then why do you still fight?’ Abaddon’s glower remained, his teeth clenched and his eyes raw in their open glare.

  ‘Because I have nothing else. I was born to fight, and forged in the fires of war. I am Astartes. I fight because it is right that we fight. The Emperor abandoned the Great Crusade, and demanded humanity pave the way for his ascension to godhood. I don’t expect to topple him from the Golden Throne, but such hubris, such evil, must always be opposed.’

  ‘And what of Curze?’

  Talos stepped closer, his muscles bunched. ‘You will not speak his name with such disrespect, Abaddon.’

  ‘You think you intimidate me, worm?’

  ‘I think I address your primarch by his title as the First Warmaster, despite his ultimate failure. You will do the same honour for the lord of my Legion, who was vindicated even in death.’

  ‘Then tell me, what of the Night Haunter? Does his murder mean nothing to you?’

  ‘The Emperor betrayed my gene-father. Even without the Great Heresy’s ideals, the need for vengeance alone would be enough for me to live my life only to see the Imperium fall.’

  At this, Abaddon nodded again. ‘I respect the Night Lords as brothers, but you are right. You are a broken Legion.’

  ‘And you are not?’

  The Warmaster turned, his voice dropping to a threatening murmur. ‘What did you say?’

  Threat, threat, threat, the rune flickered.

  ‘Do you fight, Warmaster, because you believe you can still win? After centuries of defeat, after failed Black Crusades, after infighting and war has bled your Legion dry and draped you in ignominy among the other Legions? Is it not true your men are slaved to daemons to make up for the great losses you have sustained since the death of your primarch? You leech strength from other sources, because your own Legion’s might is almost gone.’

  Silence answered this proclamation. Talos broke it again.

  ‘This meeting is a facet of that. You wonder about how my power will benefit your failing armies.’

  Abaddon might have laughed. It would have been the act of a great leader to laugh, to humour a lesser warrior, to bring him around to his own way of thinking through persuasion and empathy – even were it all false. But Abaddon was not such a leader. He was shrewd enough, at least, to guess Talos would never be fooled.

  The storm bolter barked once. Two shells roared from the muzzles, two bolts thrown by screaming daemon mouths shaped from dirty brass. Talos’s chestplate – the defiled aquila of polished ivory resplendent upon it – cracked under the impact, but it wasn’t the bolts themselves that brought him low. In a burst of inky mist, black gas streamed around him.

  On his knees before he could even blink, his retinal display registered alarms and flashing runic warnings of life signs plummeting. His armour’s machine-spirit was enraged, and he felt the rising desire through his connection junctures to slaughter anything living before him. The Astartes instinct. Defending oneself by killing all threats.

  The machine-spirit of Talos’s armour was a bastardised, hybrid sentience of anger, pride and caution, born from a meshing of the many suits of armour he had cannibalised for use over his years of war. It growled in his blood now, howling through the socket ports in his skull, his spine, his limbs, firing his own rage. He recognised its frustration instantly from the runic display on his visor. It was unable to reconcile depleted life warnings with the insane fact that, somehow, all of the ammunition counters still read at maximum.

  He was wounded without returning fire. This was unnatural. It was not how wars were fought. It had never happened before.

  ‘Preysight,’ he demanded from his armour’s soul. His vision blanketed in thermal vision, a facade of cold blues, but still somehow failed to pierce the choking gas.

  And he was choking. That in itself was insane. Each breath drew in another wisp of the black gas, filtering in through his cracked chestplate, its scent like that of burning tar and its taste like the burned earth a week after a battle. He felt the muscles in his throat and chest spasm, tightening like cables of iron. Life runes flashed in alarm – runes he’d never seen before.

  Poison. He was actually being poisoned.

  ‘Abaddon!’ he roared, immediately horrified at the breathy whisper of his voice. ‘You die for this…’

  It was when he heard the answering laugh that Talos drew Aurum. It took him an indeterminate number of heartbeats to realise the blade had fallen from his nerveless grasp to clatter on the wreckage covering the ground. All he tasted was blood and charred soil. All he felt was the cold, cold pain of his lungs going into spasming shock-lock.

  ‘I have an offer for you, prophet,’ the Warmaster’s voice came from somewhere he couldn’t see. He could barely raise his head. He hadn’t even managed to look at the split aquila on his chest and assess the damage to his armour. The draining charts and numbers filtered across his vision told him all he needed to know about his condition.

  Poisoned. How was that even possible? The gas… daemon-mist…

  Kill him before you die.

  The thought rose unbidden from the depths of his mind, and – for a moment – the unfamiliar sense of it left him cold. It was closer to a thought than a voice, an urge rather than an order, and in that doubt lay the answer. This close to death, the machine-sp
irit of his war-plate pushed easily into his fading mind. It was an invasion of unpleasant pressure, so much colder and more focused than the primal emotions and survival instincts usually massaged against his conscious thoughts. Those were easily ignored; tamed with a moment’s concentration. This was a lance of ice to the brain, strong enough to twitch his limbs in a dying attempt at obeying the words.

  ‘And,’ the Warmaster continued, ‘if you will not hear this offer from me, you will hear it from my allies.’

  ‘That was a bolter.’

  As soon as he’d said the words, Cyrion raised his own boltgun and levelled it at the bullish helm of Falkus. ‘That,’ he said again in a lower voice, ‘was a bolter. Tell me I’m wrong.’ He had the audio readout displays of his helm at the edge of his vision to assure him that he was absolutely correct, but he was caught off-guard and needed to buy time.

  The Night Lords and Black Legion squared off in the central aisle, surrounded by a hundred and more kneeling prisoners.

  ‘Abaddon,’ they had been chanting. ‘Abaddon… Abaddon… Abaddon…’ with all the conviction and reverence of a religious rite. But they’d stopped the moment the Night Lords raised their weapons.

  ‘Storm bolter,’ corrected Uzas, and they all heard the smile in his voice. ‘Not a bolter. Two barrels. Talos is dead. Life rune is unstable.’

  It was true. A single bark of a bolt weapon in the distant mess hall, and the life rune had started flickering on the edge of their retinal displays.

  As the standoff stretched out, the Black Legion Terminators remained impassive. Easy for them, Cyrion thought, backed up by over a hundred fanatics.

  ‘Talos,’ he voxed. Nothing. He switched channels with a blink at the right rune. ‘Septimus.’

  Again, nothing. He blinked at a third rune. ‘Covenant, this is First Claw.’

  Silence.

  ‘We’re being jammed,’ he voxed to the squad.

  ‘Night Lords,’ Falkus of the Black Legion murmured. ‘There has been a regrettable incident with your Thunderhawk. Come. We will provide alternate transportation back to your ship.’