‘You’ve never seen clearly.’ The warrior’s vox-voice was laden with static, flensing away any emotion. ‘Always your way, Talos. Always the prophet’s way.’ He regarded his reflection in the gladius. ‘Everything else is corrupt, or ruined, or wrong.’
The chemical taste of stimulants was acrid on the back of his tongue. Talos resisted the urge to reach for the Blood Angel blade strapped to his back. ‘Is this going to be a lecture? I’m thrilled you’ve managed to piece more than four words together into a sentence, but could we discuss my perceptions when I’m not bleeding to death?’
‘I could kill you now.’ Uzas stepped closer still. He aimed the point of the blade at the defiled aquila sculpted over the prophet’s chest, then let it rise to rest against Talos’s throat. ‘One cut, and you die.’
Blood trickled onto the blade, drip-drip-dripping from Talos’s chin. It left the edges of his lips in trails like tears.
‘Get to the point,’ he said.
‘You stare at me like I’m diseased. Like I’m cursed.’ Uzas leaned closer, his painted faceplate glaring into his brother’s eyes. ‘You look upon the Legion the same way. If you hate your own bloodline, why remain part of it?’
Talos said nothing. The ghost of a smile played at the corner of his mouth.
‘You are wrong,’ Uzas hissed. The blade bit, the barest parting of skin against the metal’s edge. With that gentle stroke of steel on skin, blood welled onto the silver. ‘The Legion has always been this way. Your eyes have taken millennia to open, and you recoil from the truth. I honour the primarch. I walk in his shadow. I kill as he killed – I kill because I can, the way he could. I hear the cries of distant divinities, and I take power from them without offering worship. They were weapons in the Great Betrayal, and they remain weapons in the Long War. I honour my father, the way you never have. I am more his son than you’ve ever been.’
Talos stared into his brother’s eye lenses, picturing the drooling visage behind the skulled faceplate. Slowly, he reached for the blade at his throat, lifting it away from his skin.
‘Are you finished, Uzas?’
‘I tried, Talos.’ Uzas jerked the blade back, sheathing it in a smooth motion. ‘I tried to salvage your pride by telling you honestly and clearly. Look at Xarl. Look at Lucoryphus. Look at the Exalted. Look at Halasker, or Dal Karus, or any son of the Eighth Legion. The blood on our hands is there because human fear tastes so very fine. Not through vengeance, or righteousness, or to ensure our father’s name echoes through the ages. We are the Eighth Legion. We kill because we were born to kill. We slay because it is fuel for the soul. Nothing else remains to us. Accept that, and... and stand... with us.’ Uzas finished with a wet, burbling growl, taking a step backwards to steady himself.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Too many words. Too much talk. The pain is back. Will you heed me?’
Talos shook his head. ‘No. Not for a moment. You say our father accepted everything I hate. If that were true, why did he consign our home world to flames? He burned a civilisation to ash, purely to stop the cancer spreading through his Legion. You’re my brother, Uzas. I will never betray you. But you are wrong, and I will save you from this suffering if I can.’
‘Don’t need saving.’ The other warrior turned his back, his tone ripe with disgust. ‘Always so blind. I don’t need to be saved. Tried to make you see, Talos. Remember. Remember tonight. I tried.’
Talos watched his brother’s retreating back as Uzas moved into the shadows.
‘I’ll remember.’
VII
FLIGHT
Freedom.
A relative concept, Maruc reflected, when I have no idea where I am. But it was a start.
Time was fluid when nothing ever changed. At his best estimate, they’d kept him chained down here like a dog for six or seven days. With no way to know for sure, he founded the guess on the amount people slept, and how much they’d been forced to shit themselves.
His world was reduced to a blanket of darkness and the smell of human waste. Every so often in the numberless hours, dull light from lamp packs would spear around the grouped people as the ship’s pale crew came in with salted strip-meat rations and tin mugs of brackish water. They spoke in a language Maruc had never heard before, hissing and ash-ash-ash-ing at each other. None of them ever addressed their captives. They came in, fed the prisoners, and left. Immersed in darkness again, the captives barely had enough chain between each of them to move more than a metre apart.
With the exaggerated stealth he’d used on Ganges, he slipped the iron ring off his chafed ankle. He was missing his boots, filthy and standing with his socks in a puddle of cold piss. Still, he thought again, it’s definitely a start.
‘What are you doing?’ asked the man next to him.
‘Leaving.’ What a question. ‘I’m getting out of here.’
‘Help us. You can’t just go, you have to help us.’ He could hear heads turning in his direction, though none of them could see through the absolute blackness. More voices joined the plea.
‘Help me.’
‘Don’t leave us here...’
‘Who’s free? Help us!’
He hissed at them to be quiet. The press of their stinking bodies was a clammy, meaty pressure all around. The slaves stood in the pitch darkness, shackled at the ankles, clad in whatever they’d been wearing when they’d been dragged from the decks of Ganges Station. Maruc had no idea how many of them were in this chamber with him, but it sounded like a few dozen. Their voices echoed off the walls. Whatever storage hold they’d been dumped in, it was big. The ship that had attacked Ganges was clearly not something to mess with, killers from myth or not.
I’ve decided not to die. It sounded foolish even to himself.
‘I’m going for help,’ he said, keeping his voice low. It was easy enough – dehydration roughened his throat, almost silencing him completely.
‘Help?’ Bodies jostled against him as someone way ahead moved position. ‘I’m in Station Defence,’ he called back in a harsh whisper. ‘Everyone’s dead on Ganges. How did you get free?’
‘I worked my shackle loose.’ He stepped away, blindly feeling through the press of bodies to where he hoped the door was. People cursed him and pushed back, as if offended by his freedom.
Relief flooded him when his outstretched hands grazed the cold metal wall. Maruc began to feel his way left, seeking the door with filthy fingertips. If he could open it, there was a chance that–
There. His questing hands met the door’s ridged edge. Now, did it open by a pressure plate mounted on the wall, or a codepad?
Here. Here it is. Maruc brushed his fingertips along the raised keys, feeling a standard nine-button codepad. Each of the buttons was larger than he’d expected, and faintly indented by use.
Maruc held his breath, hoping to slow his clamouring heart. He keyed in six buttons at random.
The door slid open on ungreased tracks, groaning loud enough to wake the dead. Light from the other side spilled into Maruc’s eyes.
‘Uh... hello,’ said a female voice.
‘Get back,’ Septimus warned. He had both pistols in his hands, aimed at the escaped slave’s head. ‘Another step. That’s right.’
Octavia rolled her eyes. ‘He’s unarmed.’
Septimus didn’t lower his bulky pistols. ‘Shine the light inside. How many are free?’ Octavia complied, panning the spear of light over the grim scene.
‘Just him.’
‘Forfallian dal sur shissis lalil na sha dareel.’ Septimus’s words were lost on her, but his face showed he was cursing. ‘We must be cautious. Watch yourself.’
She glanced at him for a moment. Watch yourself? As if she needed to be told to be careful? Idiot.
‘Of course,’ she huffed. ‘A real horde of danger here.’
‘I protect mistress.’ Her attendant, ever present at Octavia’s side, had a grubby sawn-off shotgun clutched in his bandaged hands. His sealed eyes stare
d at the freed slave. She bit back the very real need to punch both of them for their overprotective swaggering.
‘He’s unarmed,’ she repeated, gesturing at Maruc. ‘He... Sil vasha... uh... Sil vasha nuray.’
Her attendant sniggered. Octavia shot him a look.
‘That means, “He has no arms”,’ Septimus replied. He still hadn’t lowered his guns. ‘You. Slave. How did you get free?’
When the glare faded, Maruc found himself staring at three people. One was a hunchbacked little freak in a sackcloth cloak with his eyes sewn shut. Next to him, a tall girl with dark hair and the whitest skin he’d ever seen on a woman. And next to her, a scruffy fellow with bionics on his temple and cheekbone, with two pistols aimed right at Maruc’s face.
‘I worked my shackles loose,’ he admitted. ‘Look... Where are we? What are you doing to us?’
‘My name is Septimus.’ He still didn’t lower the guns. ‘I serve the Legiones Astartes aboard this ship.’ His voice carried into the chamber. No one spoke. ‘I’m here to find out each of your professions and areas of expertise, to determine your value to the Eighth Legion.’
Maruc swallowed. ‘There is no Eighth Legion. I know my mythology.’
Septimus couldn’t entirely fight down the smile. ‘Talk like that will get you killed on this ship. What was your duty on Ganges?’ As the guns came down, so did Maruc’s hands. He was suddenly uncomfortably aware that he needed a shower like never before.
‘Manufaction, mostly.’
‘You worked in the refinery?’
‘Construction. At the conveyance belts. Assembly line stuff.’
‘And the machinery?’
‘Some of it. When they broke down and needed a kick.’
Septimus hesitated. ‘That was difficult work.’
‘You’re telling me.’ A strange pride flowed through him at that moment. ‘I know it was a grind. I was the one doing it.’
Septimus holstered his guns. ‘After we have done this, you are coming with me.’
‘I am?’
‘You are.’ Septimus coughed politely. ‘You will also need to bathe.’ He entered the chamber, and the others followed him. Octavia’s attendant kept his shotgun gripped tight. The Navigator offered an awkward smile to Maruc.
‘Don’t try to run,’ she said. ‘Or he’ll shoot you. This won’t take long.’
One by one, Septimus gathered their former duties, noting them down on a data-slate. This was the third slave hold they’d visited. None of the prisoners had attacked him so far.
‘Are they dosed with kalma?’ she whispered at one point.
‘What?’
‘The pacifying narcotic. We use it on Terra, sometimes.’ She sighed at his glance. ‘Forget it. Are you slipping something into their water rations? Why don’t they do something? Why not try to fight us?’
‘Because what I’m offering them is no different from what they already did.’ He hesitated and turned to her. ‘As I remember, you didn’t fight me, either.’
She gave him what would have been a coquettish smile, had it come from a noble-born scion of a Terran spire family, clad in her full finery. Instead, it looked a little sleazy and a little wicked. ‘Well,’ she toyed with her ponytail, ‘you were much nicer to me than you were to these people.’
‘Of course I was.’ Septimus led the way out. Behind them both, Maruc and her attendant trailed along. The others had been instructed to wait until more crew came to take them to other parts of the ship, so they could clean themselves and begin their new duties.
‘So why were you nicer to me?’ she asked.
‘Because you took me by surprise. I knew you were a Navigator, but I’d never seen one before.’ His human eye glinted in the torchlight. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to be beautiful.’
She was glad the darkness hid her smile. When he tried, he could say just the right th–
‘And because you were so valuable to the Legion,’ he added. ‘I had to be careful with you. The master ordered it.’
This time, the darkness hid her glare. Idiot.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked Maruc.
‘Maruc.’
A smile preceded her answer. It was the kind of look that made him suspect her father must’ve crumbled under glances like that. ‘Don’t get used to it,’ she said. ‘Our lord and master might have a different idea.’
‘What’s your name?’ Maruc asked her.
‘Octavia. I’m the eighth.’
Maruc nodded, gesturing at Septimus’s back with a dirty finger. ‘And he’s Septimus, because he’s the seventh?’
The taller man looked back over his shoulder. ‘Exactly.’
‘I do not have a name,’ the hunched attendant provided helpfully. Stitched-shut eyes regarded him for a moment. ‘But Septimus calls me Hound.’
Maruc already hated the creepy little thing. He forced an aching smile until the twisted fellow looked away, then he glanced at the girl again. ‘Septimus and Octavia. The seventh and eighth,’ he said. When she just nodded, he cleared his sore throat to ask. ‘The seventh and eighth what?’
The Exalted sat upon its throne at the heart of the strategium, brooding amongst its Atramentar. Garadon and Malek stood closest to their liege lord, both warriors casting hulking shadows in their tusked and horned Terminator war plate, with their weapons deactivated and sheathed.
Around the raised dais, the bridge crew worked under the harsh glare of spotlighting glaring down at each console. While most warships’ command decks were bathed in illumination, the Covenant of Blood lingered in a welcome darkness broken only by pockets of light around the human crew.
The Exalted drew a breath, and listened for a voice it could no longer hear.
‘What troubles you, lord?’ This, from Garadon. The warrior shifted his stance, causing his war plate’s joints to sound in a clashing opera of grinding servos. Rather than answer, the Exalted ignored its bodyguard’s concern, keeping its thoughts turned within. The mortal shell it wore – this swollen icon of daemonic strength – was its own, through and through. The creature had wormed its way within the Legionary’s form, hollowing it out and melting across its genetic coding in the most insidious and beautiful usurpation. The body that had once been Captain Vandred Anrathi of the Eighth Legion was no more: now the Exalted reigned in this husk, proud of its theft and the comfortable malformation to suit its new owner.
But the mind, the memories – these were forever stained by the taste of another soul. To quest through the husk’s thoughts was to bear distant witness to another being’s memories, dredging them for meaning and lore. With each invasion, the Exalted’s violating mental tendrils would meet the enraged – and helpless – presence curled foetal within the thoughts. Vandred’s shade bunched itself tightly within his own brain, forever severed from the blood, bones and the flesh that he’d once commanded.
And now... silence. Silence for days, weeks.
Gone was the laughter that edged upon madness. Gone were the tormented cries promising vengeance each time the Exalted sifted through the psyche’s accumulated knowledge and instinct.
The creature breathed through its open jaws, sending tendrils of thought back into its mind. Their questing reach spilled memories and emotions in a ransacking mess.
Life upon a world of eternal night.
The stars in the sky, bright enough to hurt the eyes on cloudless evenings.
The pride of watching an enemy ship burn up in orbit, trembling its way down to crash upon the world below.
The awe, the love, a devastating rush of emotion felt while staring at a primarch father that took no pride in any of his sons’ accomplishments.
The same pale corpse of a father, broken by the lies he fed himself, inventing betrayals to sate his devouring madness.
These were fragments of what the husk’s former owner had left behind: shards of memory, scattered across the psyche in abandoned disorder.
The Exalted sifted through them, seeking anything th
at still lived. But... Nothing. Nothing existed within the bowels of this brain. Vandred, the scraps of him that had remained, were gone. Did this herald a new phase in the Exalted’s evolution? Was it at last free of the clinging, sickening mortal soul that had resisted annihilation for so many decades?
Perhaps, perhaps.
It drew breath again, licking its maw clean of the acidic saliva. With a grunt, it summoned Malek closer and–
Vandred.
It was less a name, more a press of personality, a sudden aggressive burst of memory and emotion, boiling against the Exalted’s brain. The creature laughed at the feeble assault, amused that the shadow of Vandred’s soul would mount such an attack on the dominant consciousness after all this time. The silence hadn’t been a symptom of the soul’s destruction after all; Vandred had hidden, burrowing deeper within their twisted shared psyche, building his energy for this futile attempt at a coup.
Sleep, little fleshthing, the Exalted chuckled. Back you go.
The shrieks faded slowly, until they were swallowed once more, becoming the faintest background buzz at the very edge of the Exalted’s inhuman perception.
Well. That had been an amusing distraction. The creature opened its eyes again, drawing breath into the husk to speak its decree to Malek.
A storm of light and sound awaited back in the external world: wailing sirens, rushing crew, shouting human voices. A laugh from within stroked at the Exalted’s senses – the shadow of Vandred, revelling in his pathetic victory, distracting the daemon for a handful of moments.
The Exalted rose from its throne. Already, its inhuman mind stole answers from the barrage of sensory input. The sirens were low-threat proximity warnings. The ship was still docked. The auspex console chimed in urgent declaration, a tri-pulse that suggested either three inbound ships, or several smaller vessels bunched together. Given their location, it would be worthless haulier ships in service to the Adeptus Mechanicus; an Imperial Navy patrol blown far off-course by the winds of the warp; or, in all unfortunate probability, the arrival of a vanguard fleet in the colours of the Chapter Astartes sworn to defend this region of space.
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