It was a curse, to be a god’s son.
Were these not the prophet’s own whining words? It was a curse to be a god’s son. Well, perhaps that was so. The hunter was willing to concede the point. Maybe it was a curse. But it was also a blessing.
In his quiet hours, when he was granted mercy for even a moment, the hunter believed that this was a truth the others too often forgot. Forever they looked to what they didn’t have; what they no longer possessed; glories they would never achieve again. They saw only the lack, never the plenty, and stared into the future without drawing strength from the past. That was no way to live.
A familiar pressure grew behind his eyes, worming its way within his skull. He had lingered too long in the stillness of reflection, and a price would be paid in pain. Hungers had to be sated, and punishments were inflicted when they weren’t.
The hunter moved on, his armoured boots echoing along the stone floor. The enemy fled before him, hearing the ticking thrum of active battle armour and the throaty rattle of an idling chainblade. The axe in his hands was a thing of fanged and functional beauty, its tooth-tracks oiled by sacred unguents as often as blood.
Blood. The word was a splash of acid across his cobwebbing thoughts. The unwanted scent of it, the unwelcome taste, the flowing of stinking scarlet from ruptured flesh. The hunter shivered, and looked to the gore lining his weapon’s edge. Immediately, he regretted it – blood had dried in a crimson crust on the axe’s chainsaw teeth. Pain flared again, as jagged as knives behind the eyes, and didn’t fade this time. The blood was dry. He had waited too long between kills.
Screaming released the pressure, but his hearts were pounding now. The hunter broke into a run.
The next death belonged to a soldier. He died with his hands smearing sweat-streaks over the hunter’s eyes, while the ropey contents of his stomach spilled out in a wet mess down his legs.
The hunter cast the disembowelled human against the wall, breaking bones with barely a shove. With his gladius – a noble blade that had suffered a century’s use as little more than a skinning knife – he severed the dying man’s head. Blood painted his gauntlets as he held the harvest, turning it over in his hands, seeing the shape of the skull through the pale skin.
He imagined flaying it, first slicing pale peels of skin free, then carving ragged strips of veined meat from the bone itself. The eyes would be pulled from the sockets, and the innards flushed by acidic cleansing oils. He could picture it so clearly, for it was a ritual he’d performed many times before.
The pain started to recede.
In the returning calm, the hunter heard his brothers. There, the prophet’s voice. Enraged, as always. There, the wretched one’s laughter, grinding against the prophet’s orders. The quiet one’s questions were a muted percussion beneath all of this. And there, the dangerous one’s snarls punctuated everything.
The hunter slowed as he tried to make out their words. They hunted as he hunted, that much he could make out from their distant buzzing. His name – they spoke it again and again. Confusion. Anger.
And yet they spoke of savage prey. Here? In the derelict hallways of this habitation tower? The only savagery was that which they brought themselves.
‘Brothers?’ he spoke into the vox.
‘Where are you?’ the prophet demanded. ‘Uzas. Where. Are. You.’
‘I...’ He stopped. The skull lowered in a loosening hand, and the axe lowered alongside it. The walls leered with threatening duality, both stone and steel, both carved and forged. Impossible. Maddeningly impossible.
‘Uzas.’ That voice belonged to the snarling one. Xarl. ‘I swear by my very soul, I will kill you for this.’
Threats. Always the threats. The hunter’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a wet grin. The walls became stone once more, and the threatening voices of his brothers melted back into an ignorable buzz. Let them hunt as they wished, and catch up when they could.
Uzas broke into another run, mumbling demands to the god with a thousand names. No prayers left his lips, for no son of Curze would ever speak a word of worship. He commanded the divinities to bless his bloodshed, sparing no thought for whether they might refuse. They had never done so before, and they would not do so now.
Mechanical teeth bit into armour and flesh. Last cries left screaming mouths. Tears left silver trails down pale cheeks.
To the hunter, these things signified nothing more than the passing of time.
Soon enough, the hunter stood within a chapel, licking his teeth, listening to the growl of his axe’s engine echoing back off the stone. Broken bodies lay to his left and right, thickening the cool air with blood-stink. The surviving vermin were backed into a corner, raising weapons that couldn’t harm him, pleading with words he would only ignore.
His thermal hunting vision cancelled, leaving him watching the prey through targeting locks and red eye lenses. The humans cringed back from him. None of them had even fired a shot.
‘Lord...’ one of them stammered.
The hunter hesitated. Lord? Begging, he was used to. The honorific, he was not.
This time the pain started at his temples, a pressing, knifing plunge to the centre of his skull. The hunter roared and raised his axe. As he moved closer, the humans cowered, embracing one another and weeping.
‘A fine display,’ the hunter drawled, ‘of Imperial soldiering.’
He swung at them, and the axe-blade’s grinding teeth met shining metal with a ringing crash.
Another figure stood before him – the whining prophet himself. Their weapons were locked, the blade of gold risen in defence of the cowering Imperials. His own brother was barring his bloodshed.
‘Talos,’ the hunter spoke the name through blood-wet lips. ‘Blood. Blood for the Blood God. Do you see?’
‘I am done with this.’
Each crash against his faceplate jerked his head and jarred his senses. His vision blurred over and over in quick succession, his neck snapping back hard enough to send him staggering. The corridor rang with the echo of metal on armour. Disoriented, the hunter snarled as he realised his brother had struck him in the face three times with the butt of his bolter. His mind was so slow. It was difficult to think through the pain. He sensed rather than felt his hands losing their grip on his weapons. The axe and the gladius fell to the ground.
As he regained his balance, he beheld the chapel, and... No. Wait. This was no chapel. It was a corridor. A corridor aboard the–
‘Talos, I–’
The dull clang of steel on ceramite echoed again, and the hunter’s head was wrenched to the side, the force pulling at his creaking backbone. Talos spun the blade of gold, while the hunter crashed down to the grilled decking onto his hands and knees.
‘Brother?’ Uzas managed the word through bleeding lips. It was spinal torment to raise his head, but there – behind an overturned table, the floor strewn with home-made trinkets and curios of scavenged metal – two ragged, filthy humans were recoiling from him. An ageing male and female, their faces streaked with grime. One wore a blindfold in the ever-present darkness. A Covenant tradition.
The hunter turned his head as his brother’s footfalls drew closer. ‘Talos. I didn’t know I was on the ship. I needed...’ He swallowed at the cold threat of judgment in his brother’s emotionless eye lenses. ‘I thought...’
The prophet aimed the point of his golden blade at the hunter’s throat.
‘Uzas, hear me well, even if only once in your wretched life. I will kill you the moment another word leaves your viperous lips.’
The smell of old blood and unwashed metal stained the air around them. Servitors hadn’t been directed to clean this chamber in many months.
‘He has gone too far.’ Mercutian made no effort to hide the reprimand in his voice. ‘When I stood with Seventh Claw, we didn’t avoid gathering for fear of tearing out each others’ throats.’
‘Seventh Claw is dead,’ Xarl grinned. ‘So however they governed themselves, it didn’
t pay off in the end, did it?’
‘With respect, brother, watch your mouth.’ Mercutian’s up-hiver accent was clipped and regal, while Xarl’s swam in the gutter.
Xarl bared his teeth in what would, in a human, have been a smile. In his scarred Legionary’s features, it was a predator’s challenge.
‘Children, children,’ Cyrion chuckled. ‘Isn’t it lovely when we gather like this?’
Talos let them argue. He watched from the side of the chamber, his eye lenses tracking every movement, his thoughts remaining his own. His brothers clashed with the banter and baiting so typical of warriors who struggled to keep each other’s company away from the battlefield. Each of them wore their hybrid armour: repaired, repainted, re-engineered and resealed a thousand times since they were granted ownership of it so many years before. His own armour was an efficient mess of conflicting marks, formed of trophies taken from a century’s worth of slain enemies.
Chained to the interrogation slab in the centre of the room, Uzas twitched again, a reflexive muscle spasm. The joints of his armour whirred with each tremor.
Sometimes, in rare moments of silence and introspection, the prophet wondered what their gene-sire would think of them now: broken, corrupted, wearing stolen armour and bleeding through every battle they couldn’t flee from. He looked at each of his brothers in turn, a targeting cross hair caressing their images in silent threat. The bleached skulls and cracked helms of Blood Angels hung from their armour. Each wore expressions that melded bitterness, dissatisfaction and directionless anger. Like war hounds close to slipping the leash, they barked at one another, and their fists forever strayed near holstered weapons.
His single footstep thudded an echo around the confines of the torture chamber.
‘Enough.’
They fell silent at last, but for Uzas, who was mumbling and drooling again.
‘Enough,’ Talos repeated, gentler now. ‘What do we do with him?’
‘We kill him.’ Xarl stroked a fingertip along his own jawline, where the jagged scar from a Blood Angel gladius had refused to heal cleanly. ‘We break his back, slit his throat, and kick him out of the closest airlock.’ He pantomimed a slow, sad wave. ‘Farewell, Uzas.’
Cyrion took a breath but said nothing. Mercutian shook his head, the gesture one of lamentation, not disagreement.
‘Xarl is right.’ Mercutian gestured to the prone form of their brother bound to the table. ‘Uzas has fallen too far. With three nights to indulge his bloodlust on the station, he had no excuse for losing control on board the Covenant. Do we even know how many he killed?’
‘Fourteen human crew, three servitors, and Tor Xal from Third Claw.’ As he spoke, Cyrion watched the prone form chained to the table. ‘He took five of their heads.’
‘Tor Xal,’ Xarl grunted. ‘He was almost as bad as Uzas. His death is no loss. Third Claw is little better. They’re weak. We’ve all seen them in the sparring circles. I could kill half of them alone.’
‘Every death is a loss,’ said Talos. ‘Every death diminishes us. And the Branded will want retribution.’
‘Don’t start that.’ Xarl leaned back against the wall, rattling the meat-hooks that hung there on corroded chains. ‘No more lectures, thank you. Look at the fool. He drools and twitches, after slaughtering twenty of the crew on a deluded whim. Already, the serfs are whispering of rebellion. Why is his life worth sparing?’
Mercutian turned black eyes to Talos. ‘The Blood Angels cost us a lot of crew. Even with the menials from Ganges, we must be careful in rationing human life to a madman’s chainblade. Xarl is right, brother. We should cast the serpent aside.’
Talos said nothing, listening to each of them in turn.
Cyrion didn’t meet any of their gazes. ‘The Exalted has ordered him destroyed, no matter what we decide here. If we’re going against that order, we need to have a damn fine reason.’
For a while, the brothers stood in silence, watching Uzas thrash against the chains that held him down. It was Cyrion who turned first, the servos in his neck purring smoothly as he regarded the door behind them.
‘I hear something,’ he said, reaching for his bolter. Talos was already sealing the collar locks on his helm.
And then, from the corridor beyond, came a vox-altered voice.
‘First Claw... We have come for you.’
With Tor Xal dead, Dal Karus found himself shouldering an unexpected burden.
In better days, such potential promotion would have come with a ceremony and honour markings added to his armour. And in better days, it would have also been a promotion he actually desired, rather than one he fought for out of desperation. If he did not lead, then one of the others would. Such a catastrophe was to be avoided at all costs.
‘I lead us now,’ Garisath had said. He’d gestured with his chainsword, aiming the deactivated blade at Dal Karus’s throat. ‘I lead us.’
‘No. You are unworthy.’ The words were not Dal Karus’s, despite how they echoed his thoughts.
Vejain had stepped forwards, his own weapons drawn, and started circling around Garisath. Before he realised what he was doing, Dal Karus found himself doing the same. The rest of the Branded retreated to the edges of the chamber, abstaining from the leadership challenge either from caution, prudence, or the simple knowledge that they could not best the three warriors that now advanced upon one another.
‘Dal Karus?’ Garisath’s laughter crackled over the vox. Each of them had donned their helmets as soon as they’d learned of Tor Xal’s demise. The action demanded retribution, and they would deal with it as soon as their new leader was affirmed. ‘You cannot be serious.’
Dal Karus didn’t answer. He drew his chainsword with one hand, leaving his pistol holstered, for these ritual challenges were made only with blades. Garisath hunched low, ready for either of the others to attack. Vejain, however, was edging aside, suddenly hesitant.
As with Garisath, Vejain hadn’t expected Dal Karus to move into the heart of the chamber. He was more cautious, stepping away and casting red-lensed glances between his two opponents.
‘Dal Karus,’ Vejain turned the name into a bark of vox. ‘Why do you step forward?’
In answer, Dal Karus inclined his head towards Garisath. ‘You’d let him lead us? He must be challenged.’
Garisath’s mouth grille emitted another grainy chuckle. The burn markings blackening his armour – those curving Nostraman runes branded deep into the ceramite – seemed to writhe in the gloom.
‘I will take him,’ Vejain grunted. His armour bore similar burns, depicting his own deeds in Nostraman glyphs. ‘Will you then challenge me?’
Dal Karus exhaled slowly, letting the sound rasp from his helm’s speaker grille. ‘You won’t win. He will kill you, Vejain. But I’ll avenge you. I will cut him down when he’s weakened.’
Garisath listened to this exchange with a smile behind his skullish faceplate. He couldn’t resist gunning the trigger of his chainsword. It was all the bait Vejain needed.
‘I will take him,’ the warrior insisted, and charged forwards. The two Night Lords met in a circle of their brothers, chainswords snarling and revving as the blades scraped across layered armour the colour of Terran midnight.
Dal Karus looked away at the end, which came with both inevitability and infuriating speed. The blades were almost worthless against Legion war plate, and both warriors fell into the practised, traitorous brutality of chopping at each other’s armour joints. Vejain grunted as a fist cracked his head back, and the single second he bared his articulated throat armour was more than enough for Garisath to finish him. The chainblade crashed against the softer fibre-bundles encasing Vejain’s neck and bit deep – deep enough to grind against bone. Shredded armour rained away. Blood slicked the machine-nerves that scattered across the chamber floor.
Vejain fell to his hands and knees with a clang of ceramite on steel, his life gushing away through a savaged throat. Garisath finished the decapitation with a second swi
ng of his sword. The helm clattered to the decking. The head rolled free. Garisath stopped it with his boot, and crunched it underfoot.
He beckoned with his bloodied blade. ‘Next?’
Dal Karus stepped forwards, feeling his blood sing with chemical stimulants – an aching song that spread from the pulse-point injection ports in his ancient armour. He had not raised his blade. Instead, he’d drawn his plasma pistol, which was met with disquieted mutterings. The magnetic coils ribbing the back of the weapon glowed with angry blue phosphorescence, painting a ghostly light over every Night Lord watching. The indrawn hiss of air through the muzzle’s intake valves was a rattlesnake’s blatant warning.
‘Do you all see this?’ Garisath put a sneer into his voice. ‘Bear witness, all of you. Our brother defiles our laws.’
The pistol juddered in Dal Karus’s grip now, the fusion weapon thrumming with the need to discharge its accrued power. ‘I will serve no law that does not serve us in kind.’ Dal Karus risked a glance to the others. Several of them nodded. Due to his lethality with a blade, Garisath was the leader Third Claw expected, not the one they unanimously desired. Dal Karus’s gambit was founded upon it.
‘You break tradition,’ one of the others, Harugan, spoke into the silence. ‘Lower the weapon, Dal Karus.’
‘He breaks tradition only because he has the courage enough to do so,’ Yan Sar replied, earning several vox-crackling murmurs.
‘Garisath must not lead,’ said another, and this too earned grunts of assent.
‘I will lead!’ Garisath snarled. ‘It is my right!’
Dal Karus kept the weapon as steady as its shaking power cells would allow. The timing had to be perfect: the weapon needed to be at full charge, and he could not fire unprovoked. This must bear at least some pretence of a righteous execution, not a murder.
Acknowledgment runes chimed on his retinal display, as the members of Third Claw signalled their decision. Garisath must have seen the same, or else surrendered to his frustrations, for he gave a blurt of shrieking vox from his mouth grille and leapt forward. Dal Karus squeezed the trigger, and released the contained force of a newborn sun from the mouth of his pistol.
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