Night Lords Omnibus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘You wish her to be protected?’

  ‘Most of the Astartes do not even know she exists, and would not care if they did. Their attention is forever elsewhere. But she is a talisman to we “mere mortals” of the Covenant.’ He smiled again. ‘She’s a lucky charm, if you will. With my seal, she is under the guardianship of Talos. Any who meet her will know this. Any who threaten her will die by his hands.’

  She considered his generosity, not liking where her thoughts led. ‘And what about you? Without that seal…’

  ‘Priorities.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Priorities, Octavia. Focus on your future, not mine.’ He nodded to the doors ahead, dark and sealed at the end of the corridor. ‘We’re here.’

  ‘Will you be waiting?’ she asked him. ‘When this is over?’

  ‘No. I am retrieving First Claw from the surface within the hour.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m sorry. If I could…’

  ‘Fair enough.’ She touched the metal band implanted on her forehead. Strange, the things one could get used to. With a smile, she said, ‘I’ll see you soon.’

  Septimus nodded and the Navigator entered the apothecarium. As the doors opened, the servitor surgeons powered up from their sterile silence. Septimus watched them until the doors closed again with a grinding clank. They were a familiar sight for him, having been in their care for weeks himself.

  He checked his wrist chron once Octavia was out of sight, and made his patient way back through the ship. The war on the surface of Crythe once again demanded his presence.

  Octavia emerged two hours later. The band of restrictive metal was gone from her forehead. She wore a headband of black silk, given to her by Septimus for this purpose, to use when the time was right. It neatly covered her third eye.

  In her pocket was a silver Legion medallion, handed to her by a nameless Astartes who presided over her surgery. He hadn’t said a word the whole time.

  She turned it over in her hands, seeing the same tower symbol minted into the metal. A hive spire. Somewhere on Nostramo, most likely. On the other side, the impression of a face, lost to time’s wear, with the faint inscription ‘Ave Dominus Nox’.

  This she could read, for it was High Gothic, not Nostraman. Hail the Lord of the Night. The ruined face, smoothed by age, must be their father – the Night Haunter. She looked at the featureless visage for a long moment, then pocketed the coin.

  Staring into the darkness, she suppressed a shiver of fear. This was the first time she’d been out of her quarters without an escort. The seal in her jacket pocket was cold comfort in the bowels of the Covenant. What guarantee did she have that anyone down here would care if she carried the coin?

  Her hand vox crackled, and she knew who it would be. Only two people ever voxed her, and Septimus was planetside.

  ‘Hello, Etrigius,’ she said.

  ‘Are you coming for another lesson tonight?’

  She reached up to touch the silk bandana, and a wicked little smile creased her lips.

  ‘Yes, Navigator,’ she said.

  ‘I will send servitors at once,’ he replied.

  She thumbed the coin in her pocket, and stared into the darkened corridor ahead.

  ‘No need,’ she said, and started moving, her heart beating in time to her hurried footsteps. Eyes – unseen by Octavia but not unnoticed by her – watched as she walked the blackened halls of the tainted ship.

  Long before he had earned the honour of wearing the war-plate of the VIII Astartes Legion, Talos had ghosted through the streets of his birth hive on his home world. It was a life lived in the darkness, a life of avoiding stronger predators and carefully choosing weaker prey.

  He knew he’d come late to the Legion, and the fact pained him. Nostramo was already forgetting the lessons learned under the claws of the Night Haunter. Scant years after the great Konrad Curze had ascended into the heavens to wage war with his Imperial father, the world he left behind began its inexorable backslide into familiar degeneracy.

  Street gangs carved out territories in the habitation and industrial sectors; little princelings marking their claimed turn by runes painted on walls and – in echo of the Haunter himself – the remains of enemies prominently displayed where their kin and brethren would take heed.

  Talos had known Xarl even then. They had grown up together, sons of mothers widowed in the underworld wars that broke out once the shadow of the Haunter was a fear of the past. Before their tenth birthdays, both boys were accomplished thieves, inducted into the same gang claiming their hab sector as its domain.

  By the time the boys were thirteen, both were killers. Xarl had killed two kids from a rival gang, peppering their bodies from an ambush with his heavy-calibre autopistol. He’d needed both hands to hold that gun, and the sound it made when it fired… A deafening boom that split the silence.

  Talos had been there when Xarl made his first kills, but had shed no blood himself that night. His own first murder had been the year before, when a storekeeper had sought to beat them for stealing food. Talos had reacted before his conscious mind even gripped the situation – a brutal, primal flash of instinct that saw the storekeeper coughing and gasping on the floor, Talos’s knife buried to the hilt in his heart.

  Even now, even over a hundred years later for Talos, while the galaxy had turned ten thousand years since that old man had last drawn breath, he still remembered the strange friction of the blade slamming home.

  It stayed with him, that sensation: the scratching twist as the first thrust buckled, defeated by the weak armour of the man’s rib bones. Then the way the blade had sped up as it slid between the ribs, sticking fast with a sickening, meaty whisper of a sound.

  Blood immediately came from the man’s lips. A spluttering spray. Talos felt the flecks of spit-thinned blood on his cheeks, his lips and in his eyes.

  They’d run in a panic, Xarl half-laughing and half-crying, Talos in stunned silence. As always, they took to the streets, hiding there, making the dark city into the haven their homes would never be. Places to get lost, ways to stalk prey, a million ways to move unseen.

  These were the lessons he took with him to the stars, when his own ascension came. These were the instincts he relied on when he stalked the night-time cities of a hundred and more worlds.

  Uzas’s voice, voxed from some distance away, was agitated.

  ‘I’ve found a Black Legion Rhino. It’s a wreck. This must be what happened to Ulth Squad.’

  ‘Survivors?’ Talos asked.

  ‘Not even any bodies.’ They all heard the regret in his voice. Bodies meant armour, and armour meant salvage.

  ‘Mass laser fire damage.’

  ‘Skitarii,’ put in Cyrion. The Mechanicus footsoldier elite. It stood to reason – no one else would have laser fire capable of totalling an Astartes transport.

  ‘You hear that?’ Uzas said. ‘I hear something.’

  ‘How truly specific,’ Cyrion chuckled.

  ‘I’m getting it, too,’ Xarl cut in. ‘Broken vox, scattered chatter from other frequencies. Other squads.’

  ‘The Black Legion?’ asked Talos.

  ‘No,’ Xarl replied. ‘I think it’s us.’

  Talos moved through the ruined manufactory as he listened to his squadmates. His red-tinted sight took in the stilled machinery, the idle conveyor belts, the tall roof with its shattered stained glass skylights where once the scene of the Emperor-as-Machine-God, coming to ancient Mars, had filtered the brilliance of the night sky.

  Stars shone down now, illuminating the gargoyle-decorated building with silver silence. Whatever they had made here would never be made here again. The place was a tomb.

  ‘The vox is unreliable,’ Cyrion said. ‘What a revelation. Everybody, hold positions, I’m going to contact the Warmaster and let him know.’

  ‘Shut up, fool,’ Xarl snapped. ‘Talos?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Frequency Scarlet sixteen-one-five. You hear that?’

  It took a few mom
ents for his helm’s vox-link to shift and scan nearby signals. He continued to walk through the silent manufactory, bolter and blade at the ready. Soon enough, voices prickled at the edge of his hearing.

  ‘I hear it,’ he voxed back to the others.

  ‘What should we do?’ Cyrion asked, dead serious now. He’d heard it, too. ‘That’s Seventh Claw.’ There was a pause as he called up data, most likely on his auspex’s data screen. ‘The armament manufactorum, to the west.’

  Talos idly checked his bolter, whispering praise to the machine-spirit within. The vox on the surface of Crythe was a savage, fickle thing, never reliable, always punctured and scrambled by the Mechanicus’s arcane technology. Since the Legions had made planetfall, squads had grown used to the violated vox and being cut off from one another.

  The fleet orbiting Crythe was blessedly free of the worst of the forge world’s twisted vox-screeching, but the squads on the surface were forced to listen to an unending howl of code mangling their signals. Even vox fed through the ships’ systems were still often subject to bizarre ghosting, added voices, and delays of several hours. Many times now, squads had responded to positioning information and orders that were half a day out of date.

  ‘They’re trying other frequencies to summon reinforcements,’ Talos said.

  ‘That’s my guess,’ Cyrion agreed.

  ‘The Exalted will not be pleased if we abandon our recall orders.’ Uzas sounded pleased, his voice low and scratchy. Talos forced the image of himself so battered and bloody, speaking with the same voice, from his mind. Blood for the Blood God, he’d said in the vision… Souls for the Soul Eater…Skulls for the Skull Throne…

  ‘To hell with the Exalted,’ said Xarl.

  ‘We’re going to Seventh Claw,’ Talos said, already blink-clicking a Nostraman rune to open another channel. ‘Septimus.’

  ‘Here, master.’ The signal was choppy, swamping the serf pilot’s voice in jagged crackles. ‘Scheduled retrieval in fourteen minutes. En route to your position.’

  ‘Change of plans.’

  ‘I don’t dare ask why, lord. Just tell me what you need. This isn’t Blackened, there’s only so much I can do in a transporter.’

  ‘It’s fine. Full burn to my position, combat retrieval protocol, then full burn to coordinates Cyrion is transmitting now.’

  ‘Lord… Combat retrieval? Is the sector not clear?’

  ‘It’s clear. But you will be taking First Claw and our Land Raider to an engagement zone west of here.’

  ‘By your command, lord.’ Talos heard Septimus take a breath. The mortal knew the Exalted had demanded First Claw’s recall. ‘Actually, I’ve changed my mind. I do want to know. May I ask what exactly is going on?’

  ‘Seventh Claw is pinned down. We are going to break them out.’

  ‘Forgive me for asking again, lord. What is pinning them down, that requires First Claw and its Land Raider?’

  ‘A Titan,’ Talos said. ‘Now hurry.’

  XII

  SEVENTH CLAW

  The street shivered under its tread.

  Dozens of windows facing the avenue shattered in their frames and dust rained from the walls of broken buildings. The thunder of its splay-clawed feet wasn’t even the loudest aspect of its presence. Louder still were the roaring whines of its great joints, great mechanical shrieks that split the air as it walked. And louder yet, the cacophonous bellow of its weaponised arms, burning the air when they sucked in power to fire and illuminating the world around it with the light of blinding dawn as they released their fury.

  Adhemar of Seventh Claw crawled through the rubble of what had, moments before, been a habitation block. His vision flickered and hissed, all sense lost with the damage taken to his helm. Even his life readouts were scrambled, displaying nothing of use, nothing he could make out. With a curse, he tore the helm from his head, freeing his natural senses. The air was ash-thick and vibrating with the resonant booms of the Titan’s stride. It was still some way down the avenue, bringing its guns to bear once more. Seventeen metres tall, almost as many wide, it hunched in the road, taking up so much of the street that its brutish shoulders made squealing tears in the buildings as it raked them with its bulk.

  The Astartes knew those armoured shoulders shielded several crew members at work around the inner reactor, chanting their irritating prayers to the Emperor in His guise as the Machine-God. The fact he could not slay them, the fact he had nothing which he could even deal damage with, galled him almost beyond apoplexy. He glared at the canine head of the Titan, picturing the three pilots inside, leashed to their control thrones by hardwiring and restraint harnesses.

  How they must be laughing right now…

  Adhemar’s throat and lungs tightened, filtering out the dust in the air as though it were a poison. Ignoring this biological reaction, the Night Lord dragged himself to his feet and ran behind the still-standing wall of a nearby building. The street, which had once been the main thoroughfare of a habitation sector, was a tumbledown wasteland in the wake of the Titan’s anger. One of its weapons, like a gnarled right fist, was a multi-barrelled monstrosity that hurled hundreds of bolt shells a second at its targets below. Every impacting shell chewed a metre-wide hole in the Warhound’s steel and stone surroundings. With thousands of shells fired every minute, Adhemar wasn’t surprised at the level of destruction. He was merely surprised he still drew breath.

  Most of his squad didn’t share that fortune.

  An ugly chime rang out, reminiscent of a cracked bell calling the Imperial faithful to morning prayer. Adhemar’s muscles locked solid as he remained where he was. It was the echolocation pulse of the Titan’s auspex. If he moved, it would know where he was. Hell, if it even sensed the minimal heat of his power armour, it would know… but he was counting on the Titan’s systems being aligned to hunt larger prey.

  Fifty metres down the road, shadowed from the moonlight by two towers that had escaped its opening wrath, it stood on its backwards-jointed legs, wolfish cockpit-head grinding left and right on servos that whined at agonising volume.

  He heard the next attack before he saw it – the grunted cough of a missile launched nearby. From the second level of a ruined building, a streak of howling smoke slashed across the street. Adhemar moved to watch the missile’s course, narrowing his eyes as his Astartes cognition instinctively took in the details of the warhead’s angle and the certainty of its impact point.

  Denied his vox, he whispered to himself.

  ‘Mercutian, what are you doing…’

  The missile exploded in a fragmentary starburst against the Titan’s faintly-shimmering void shields, and the Warhound was already responding. The great left fist came up on roaring gears with punishing speed.

  Inferno gun.

  Adhemar was back in cover within a single heartbeat, not because he was in the line of fire, but because to look at the weapon firing would be to invite hours of blindness. Even with his eyes closed and head turned away, the son of Nostramo felt the brightness assault his retinas with jabs of migraine-coloured pain. The massive gun fired with the challenging roar of a feral world predator, blasting searing air in all directions from its heat exchange vanes.

  Adhemar exhaled a lungful of the burning air, feeling it scrape his throat. He knew without looking that the chemical wash of vicious liquid fire had flooded the building, dissolving everything within. The expected crash came moments later, as the building’s structure withered under the superheated force of the assault.

  Was it his imagination, or had he heard a moment’s cry from the vox of his helm in his hands? Had he heard one of his brother’s death screams?

  Mercutian was undeniably dead. Brave, without a doubt, to think to harm the Titan with one of his last rockets, but the gesture was futile even before he took aim. Picking the god-machine apart once its layered shields were down was one thing. Getting those shields down in the first place was quite another.

  Adhemar hooked his sundered helm onto the magn
etic coupling of his belt, and reached for his auxiliary vox within a thigh pouch. The earpiece felt alien; he was so used to the enclosing sensory magnification of his helm.

  He doubted there was anyone still with him, but it was worth the attempt.

  ‘Seventh Claw, status report.’

  ‘Adhemar?’

  ‘Mercutian?’

  ‘Aye, brother-sergeant.’

  ‘How in the infinite hells are you still alive?’ It was an effort not to raise his voice with incredulity.

  ‘You saw me take that missile shot?’

  ‘And I thought I heard you die.’

  ‘Not yet, sir. I made a tactical withdrawal. At speed.’

  Adhemar resisted the urge to laugh. ‘So you ran.’

  ‘Ran and threw myself from the third storey of that building’s south-facing side. My armour’s a mess and I lost my launcher. Adhemar, we’ve got to get to the Rhino. The plasma gun is–’

  ‘Not going to take down a Warhound Titan.’

  ‘You have any better ideas?’

  A grinding chorus of immense gears started up down the avenue again. Adhemar risked another glance around the edge of the wall.

  ‘Bad news. Do you have visual?’

  ‘I’m in the adjacent street, sir. I can’t see the beast.’

  ‘It’s found the Rhino.’

  The Titan had indeed. It hunched, every inch the feral predator, glaring down at Seventh Claw’s troop transport nestled in a narrow alleyway. The collapse of the last building had revealed its dark armoured hull. Rubble from the fallen hab block was scattered across its roof, leaving bursts of gunmetal grey where the blue paint was scraped away.

  ‘I have an idea,’ Adhemar voxed.

  ‘Adhemar, sir, with respect… we need to get out of here. There’s no honour in this death.’

  ‘Be silent. If we can get its shields down…’

  ‘That’s an impossible “if”. If we could fly or piss plasma, we’d have the job done, too. None of those things will happen.’

  ‘Wait. It’s moving.’

  The howl of great gears intensified. Adhemar watched, whispering a prayer to the machine-spirit of his Rhino, the faithful vehicle that had carried him across countless battlefields. He knew its interior as well as he knew his own armour. He could read the tank’s temperament in the grunts of its idling engine, and feel its arrogance in the clank and ding of every gunshot that sparked harmlessly from its hull.