Their bolters opened up with harsh chatters, detonating priceless, irreplaceable Imperial machines as the Night Lords left naught but scrap in their wake.
Yet, something was wrong. Cyrion voxed the others, lowering his bolter as they entered another underground apothecarion.
‘As thrilling as this worthless vandalism is proving to be, I’ve been paying attention to the general channels. No squad has crossed paths with any assassins yet. Talos, brother, you were lied to. There are no Callidus here. It’s an abandoned temple. This place is a tomb.’
Talos cursed, swinging his golden blade and splitting a surgical table in two. Both halves clattered to the tiled floor.
‘She was not lying,’ he said angrily. ‘I have seen it in my visions. I heard the truth in her voice, after seventeen days of excruciation. The hololithic is here.’
The two warriors faced each other, edging closer to open argument. It was Cyrion that backed down, offering a salute, fist over his breastplate.
‘As you say, brother.’
Talos cursed in Nostraman, a flowing sentence of bitter expletives leaving his lips and emerging harsh over the ragged vox-link. Just as he drew breath to order the squad onwards, the general channel sparked into life.
‘Brothers, this is the Exalted. My honour guard has reached the thirtieth sub-level. It is a Hall of Archives. First Claw, come to me at once. Talos… You were right.’
Talos entered the chamber, and confusion took hold before anything else. The librarium had clearly been swept clean long before the Legion had arrived in orbit, leaving empty bookshelves, blank display cases, and bare plinths.
Warriors from the Legion lined the walls – Night Lords from squads and warbands that First Claw didn’t recognise. In the heart of the room stood the Exalted, its twisted bulk overshadowing the warriors nearby. The daemon in its heart was forever reshaping the Exalted’s outer flesh, and the Legion lord hadn’t been human – or even a transhuman – in many hundreds of years. A spined monstrosity of clawed hands and hulking armour breathed in a deep thunder rumble. It inclined its malformed head, grimacing through black fangs because it struggled to form any other facial expression through the mutations of its skull structure.
‘Talos,’ it said. ‘The temple has been abandoned. The slaves left here were nothing more than custodians, remaining in the event of the Callidus’s return.’
Talos stepped closer, his ceramite boots disturbing the dust of ages on the dark stone floor. Other footsteps tracked hither and thither across the ground. The tread of his Legion brothers. None were human. Humans had not walked these halls in years.
‘I do not understand. You said I was right.’
The Exalted held out its claw, each bladed finger possessing too many joints. In the daemon creature’s palm was a fist-sized sphere of discoloured bronze. A single lens peered from the sphere’s side – a glaring eye of green glass.
A hololithic recorder.
‘You were right. This remained, when all else was taken.’
‘They wanted us to find it,’ said Talos.
‘It is not the original. Our hunt to destroy the original recording remains unfulfilled. But this… this is enough, for now. The Legion will thank you.’
Talos bit back his disgust at what the Exalted had become, taking the bronze sphere without comment. A simple twist of the top hemisphere caused a series of clicks from within, and the soft whirring of the lens brought itself into focus.
A grainy image beamed from the lens, monochrome green like watered-down jade. It showed…
‘The Lord of the Night…’ breathed Talos reverently.
It showed a hunched figure, its posture and musculature somewhere between human perfection and bestial corruption. The distortion stole too much clarity to make any true details, but the figure’s face – his narrow eyes and fanged maw – smote the hearts of all bearing witness to it.
Primarch. Konrad Curze, the Night Haunter, Commander of the VIII Legion. Their father. The genetic forebear and biological template of every living Night Lord.
The flickering hololithic primarch rose from a throne stolen by distortion. He advanced in a silence that spoke of faulty recording, his movements jerky and interrupted by static interference.
None of that mattered. After centuries, the Lord of the Night’s loyal sons were seeing him once again. Their father’s ghost, here in this tomb of a temple.
If the Callidus had left the hololithic record to mock the Legion that would one day find it, they had severely misjudged the closure it offered, and the resurgence of purpose felt by every warrior present. Gauntlets clutched at bolters with inspired strength. Several warriors wept behind their skulled faceplates.
‘Ave Dominus Nox.’ They chanted the words in worshipful, thankful monotone. ‘Ave Dominus Nox. Hail the Lord of the Night.’
The primarch’s last moments of life unfolded before their eyes. The towering demigod laughed, still locked in eerie silence, and then leapt forwards. A burst of visual static scratched the image into oblivion, only for it to reset and restart a moment later.
A wraith doomed to repeat its actions into eternity: the Night Lords primarch rose from his throne again, spoke words that went unheard, laughed without sound, and raced forwards, only to vanish again.
‘I remember seeing it in the flesh,’ whispered the Exalted. ‘I recall watching him rise from the throne, so many years ago, and obeying his order to watch as the assassin approached. I remember how he laughed before he leapt at her.’
Talos cancelled the archival playback, staring down at the metal orb in his hand. It had several settings, each one activated by turning the top hemisphere by a few degrees to the next frequency.
He lowered his hand, keeping the orb in his fist.
‘We will ensure every Legion ship is granted a copy of the images contained here,’ he said. ‘Some things must be kept fresh in our memories. Come, brothers. We should return to orbit. There’s nothing more for us to find here.’
The deck shuddered beneath Talos’s feet as the Covenant of Blood pulled out of orbit. He had stood with his brothers of First Claw on the command deck, as the Legion fleet bombarded the temple site from orbit. The lances cut down into the planet below, a tectonic barrage that levelled the entire mountain range.
Then, one by one, the Night Lords warships broke away.
Alone in his meditation chamber, Talos regarded the hololithic recorder orb once more. He turned the device to its first setting, and watched his father laugh in the seconds before his death.
He watched this seven more times, before twisting the recorder to its next setting. Nothing happened. He tried the next, and received the same result.
Only the last setting contained another archive. A vox-recording.
Talos recognised the voice immediately. It was the assassin who had slain his father in the age before the Long War. More than that, it was the woman he had disembowelled and torn apart himself, in pursuit of vengeance.
She spoke from the grave, ten thousand years dead, repeating the same words just as the primarch’s spirit was caged into repeating the same actions.
This is M’Shen, daughter of the Callidus. I’ve found Commander Curze of the Night Lords Legion. I–
The recording broke into static.
This is M’Shen, daughter of the Callidus. I’ve found Commander Curze of the Night Lords Legion. I–
More static.
This is M’Shen, daughter of the Callidus. I’ve found Commander Curze of the Night Lords Legion. I–
Static.
PROLOGUE
A CRUCIFIED ANGEL
The warrior turned his helm over in his hands. Gauntleted fingertips stroked along the dents and scratches marring the midnight ceramite. The faceplate was painted white with an artisan’s care, in stylised mimicry of a human skull. One scarlet eye lens was ruined, cobwebbed by cracks. The other stared, dispassionate in deactivation, reflecting the darkening sky above.
He told himse
lf that this wasn’t symbolic. His helm’s ruination didn’t reflect the damage done to his Legion. Even as he quenched the notion, he wondered from whence it came. The war had a proven and profane habit of fanning the embers of melancholy, but still. There were limits.
The warrior took a breath, seeing inhuman creatures dance and bleed behind his closed eyes. He’d been dreaming of the eldar lately, for months before setting foot on this desolate world. Thousands of them: spindly things with gaunt faces and hollow eyes, aboard a burning ship of black sails and false bone.
‘Soul Hunter,’ someone called. His brother’s voice, making the name somewhere between a joke and a title of respect.
The warrior replaced his helm. One eye lens flickered live, bathing the vista in the killing-red of his targeting vision. The other showed angry grey static and the distracting after-images of visual input lag. It still echoed with a grainy and colourless view of the setting sun a few moments after he’d turned away from it.
‘What?’ the warrior asked.
‘The Angel is breaking.’
The warrior smiled as he drew the gladius sheathed at his shin. Fading sunlight flashed off the blade’s edge as the steel met cold air.
‘Glorious.’
Crucifying one of the Imperial Astartes had been a delicious conceit, and served well as a means to an end. The warrior hung slack from his bonds, bathed in pain but surrendering no sound from his split lips. The Emperor’s ‘Angels of Death’, the warrior smiled. Stoic to the last.
With no iron spikes to hand, getting him up there required a degree of improvisation. Ultimately, the leader ordered his men to bind the Angel to the hull of their tank by impaling the prisoner’s limbs with their gladii.
Blood still dripped to the decking in liquid percussion, but had long since ceased to trickle with rainwater eagerness. The Adeptus Astartes physiology, despite its gene-written immortality, only held so much blood.
Beneath the crucified captive, a helm rested in repose. The warrior dismissed another unwelcome tide of reflection at the sight of a helm so like his own but for the colours of allegiance and the bonds of a bloodline. With no real venom, he crushed it beneath his boot. How keen and insipid, the tendrils of melancholy lately.
The warrior looked up, baring features destroyed by mutilating knives. His armour was ceramite – halved with rich blue and pure white – pitted and cracked around the impaling short swords. His face, once so grim and proud, was a skinless display of bare veins and bloody, layered musculature. Even his eyelids had been cut away.
‘Hail, brother,’ the warrior greeted the captive. ‘Do you know who we are?’
With the angel broken, a confession took no time at all. To speak the words, he came up close, the purred question rasping through his helm’s vocabulator into the air between them. The warrior’s faceplate was almost pressed to the Angel’s flayed features – two skulls staring at one another as the sun went down.
‘Where is Ganges?’
As his brothers prepared, the warrior watched the distant fortress burning on the horizon, paying heed to how it devoured the world around it. A sprawl of towers and landing platforms – its dark mass ate the land while its smoking breath choked the sky. And yet it offered so little of worth when laid bare to plundering hands. Why attack a world if the one node of resources was already drained dry? Piracy without profit was nothing more than begging.
Undignified. Oh, yes. And embarrassing.
The warrior stared at its distant battlements – a meagre stronghold on a lifeless world, claimed by a thin-blooded Chapter calling itself the Marines Errant. A raid for weapons, for supplies, for precious, precious ammunition... wasted. The Chapter’s own crusades bled their reserves to nothing, leaving naught but scraps for the Eighth Legion’s grasping hands.
The fortress fell within a day, offering as little sport as plunder. Servitors and robed Mechanicum acolytes tore through the databanks in the nigh-abandoned stronghold, but discovered only what every warrior already knew: the raid was a waste of their diminishing ammunition reserves. The Marines Errant no longer stored their secondary armoury here.
‘Things have changed since we last sailed these reaches of the void,’ the Exalted growled to his command crew. The confession pained him, pained them all. ‘We have hurled our last spears... to conquer a husk.’
Amidst the bitterness of desperation and disappointment, the embers of possibility still burned. One word cycled through the streams of data, over and over again. Ganges. Representing the ties in this sector of space between the Marines Errant and the Martian Mechanicus, a deep-void outpost was responsible for a significant supply of raw material for the Chapter’s armoury. The Marines Errant, so proud in their armour of oceanic blue and marble white, maintained order within the subsector by vigilant destruction of human and alien pirates. In protecting Mechanicus interests, they earned the allegiance of Mars. In earning such unity, they garnered a share in the Mechanicus’s significant munitions production. A circle of symbiosis, fuelled by mutual interest.
The warrior admired that.
What mattered most was this deep-space refinery’s location, and that eluded all who sought to find it. Sealed behind unbreakable encryptions, the only answer that mattered remained known to none.
The few prisoners taken from the hollow monastery offered little in the way of information. Human attendants, lobotomised servitors, Chapter serfs... None knew where Ganges lay in the heavens. What few Imperial warriors had defended this worthless world died to their brothers’ bolters and blades, embracing their deaths as honourable sacrifice rather than risk capture and desecration.
A single defender yet drew breath. The warrior dragged him onto the ash plains to be flayed under the setting sun.
Even now, the Errant still drew breath, though not for much longer. He had revealed all the Eighth Legion needed to know.
Ganges. A raid there would reap much richer rewards.
In orbit, the Vectine system’s sun was a vast orb of adrenal orange, a colour of deep fire and desperate strength. On the surface of the third world, it was a weeping eye, closed by the smog that blocked most of its brightness. The warrior watched it finally set behind the devastated stronghold.
A voice came to him, carried on the crackling waves of the vox network.
‘Soul Hunter,’ it said.
‘Stop calling me that.’
‘Sorry. Uzas is eating the Errant’s gene-seed.’
‘The Errant is dead? Already?’
‘Not quite. But if you wish to execute him yourself, now is the time. Uzas is making a mess.’
The warrior shook his head, though there was no one to see it. He knew why his brother was asking: the Errant had been the one to break his helm, firing a bolter at close range during the assault and savaging the faceplate. Vengeance, even vengeance this petty, was tempting.
‘We have all we need from him,’ the warrior said. ‘We should return to the ship soon.’
‘As you say, brother.’
The warrior watched as the stars opened their eyes, scarcely piercing the dense cloud cover, little more than pinpricks of dull light. Ganges was out there, and with it, the chance to breathe easily again.
I
ECHOES
The ship was quiet as she walked its cobwebbing corridors.
Not quite a lack of sound, more a presence in itself that ghosted down the black iron hallways. Three days had passed since the Covenant of Blood last sailed under power. Now it coasted through space, its decks cold and its engines colder. The hunt, they called it, in their whispering tongue. This ethereal drift through the void, sailing in powerless silence closer to the target, seen and heard by none. The hunt.
Octavia called it waiting. Nothing was more tedious to a Navigator. The hull still creaked as abused steel settled, but the sounds of the crew were more muted than ever before. So few remained now.
One of her attendants trailed at her heels as she walked from her chamber. He was a scruffy,
robed thing, more than half of his hunched form given over to crude bionics.
‘Mistress,’ he whispered over and over. ‘Mistress, mistress. Yes. Mistress. I follow mistress.’ He didn’t seem able to lift his voice above a whisper.
Octavia was learning to ignore the annoying creatures. This one was one of the ugliest in the pack of augmented men and women that professed to serve her. It stood only as high as her shoulder, with its eyes sewn shut by thick, crude stitching. Whatever modifications were done to its body whirred, clicked, ticked and tocked as it loped along with a hunchback’s gait. ‘Mistress. Serve mistress. Protect mistress. Yes. All of these things.’
It regarded her with an eyeless face, looking up and seeing her through means she wasn’t sure she wanted to understand. Bizarrely, he looked hopeful. He seemed to want praise for shuffling along by her side and occasionally bumping into walls.
‘Shut up,’ she told him, rather politely given the circumstances.
‘Yes,’ the hunched man agreed. ‘Yes, mistress. Quiet for mistress. Yes. Silence now.’
Well, it’d been worth a try. ‘Please go back to the chamber,’ she said, and even smiled sweetly. ‘I will return soon.’
‘No, mistress. Must follow mistress.’
Her reply was an unladylike snort as their boots continued to clank along the hallway decking. Their images walked with them as they passed a hull section of reflective steel. Octavia couldn’t resist a glance at herself, though she knew she wasn’t going to like what she saw.
Ratty black hair, with its snarls only half tamed by a fraying ponytail. Pale skin, sunless and unhealthy. Her jaw line sported a faded bruise she couldn’t recall earning, and her ragged clothes were smeared with oil and general deck-dirt, the rough fabric dyed the blue of a midnight sky back home on Terra. If her clothes had been tidier, they’d have formed a uniform: the attire of the ship’s slave caste, loose and unwashed, hanging off her slender frame.
‘Pretty as a picture,’ she accused her scruffy reflection.
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