Night Lords Omnibus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘What’s this?’ He held up a metal object the size of his thumb.

  Septimus glanced over to the older serf. Maruc’s desk in the shared workchamber was a mess of drill bits, files and oiled cloths. A half-assembled bolt pistol was scattered over the surface. Septimus put down the creased schematics he’d been studying.

  ‘A suspensor. It’s for Lord Mercutian’s heavy bolter.’

  The ship gave another shiver.

  ‘Was that–?’

  ‘No.’ Septimus turned from Maruc’s worried gaze, silently hoping Octavia would head for calmer tides. ‘Whatever you were going to ask, it wasn’t that. Don’t ask, just work.’

  ‘Listen, Septimus...’

  ‘I am listening.’

  ‘This is a rough ride. Rougher than even the bulk transport rigs I’ve sailed on. What if something goes wrong?’

  Septimus just stared at him. ‘What do you plan to do? Run outside and bind the hull together with industrial adhesive? By all means, go ahead. There are a million monsters waiting to cut up your soul, and I’ll have the unwelcome pleasure of training someone else.’

  ‘How can you be so calm?’ Maruc scratched his cheek, leaving a smear of oil on his skin.

  ‘I am calm because there’s nothing I can do about it.’

  ‘I’ve heard stories about ships getting lost in the warp...’

  Septimus went back to his reading, though one gloved hand rested on his holstered pistol. ‘Trust me, the stories do not approach the truth. The reality is much worse than your Imperial fairy tales. And now is really not the time to dwell on it.’

  The ship gave another shake, this one severe enough to throw them both from their seats. Yells from other decks echoed through the ship’s hull in an eerie cacophony.

  ‘Warp engines are dead again,’ Maruc swore, touching his fingertips to a bleeding temple. He’d cracked his head on the table edge as he went down.

  ‘Sinthallia shar vor vall’velias,’ Septimus hissed as he picked himself up off the decking.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  The other serf brushed his gloved fingers through his hair, keeping it out of his face. ‘It means, “That woman will be the death of us”.’

  Octavia leaned forwards in her throne, knuckling her closed eyes. Sweat dripped from her forehead onto the decking, making the soft pitter-patter of gentle rainfall. She spat, tasting blood and choosing not to look. The eye in the middle of her forehead ached from staring too long, and itched from the sweat trickling at its edges.

  With a sigh, she slouched back. At least the ship had ceased its trembling. If the last few times were anything to go by, she had between one and three hours’ rest before the Exalted ordered her to pull the ship back into the warp. This last juddering fall from the Sea of Souls had been the worst by far. Octavia felt her lingering connection to the ship, and the distress of the crew bleeding through the vessel’s steel bones. People were injured this time. She’d dropped out of the warp much too sharply, though she’d held on as long as she could, until she’d almost felt her blood starting to boil.

  ‘Mistress?’ she heard a voice ask.

  She knew the voice, and felt how close it was. She knew if she opened her eyes, she’d see a dead girl staring back at her.

  ‘You’re not there,’ she whispered.

  The dead girl stroked her fingers along Octavia’s knee. The Navigator’s skin prickled, and she jerked back in her seat.

  Opening her human eyes was exquisitely difficult. A moment of strangely pleasant reluctance preceded the closing of her third eye, and the thrashing uncolours faded to a more traditional nothingness. Her human eyes opened with some effort, gummy with tears.

  Hound kneeled at the front of her throne, his bandaged hands on her knee.

  ‘Mistress?’ he almost whined.

  Hound. It’s just Hound. ‘Water,’ she managed to say.

  ‘Already have water for mistress,’ he replied. He reached beneath his tattered cloak, drawing forth a grubby-looking canteen. ‘It is warm. For this, I am sorry.’

  She forced a smile for the eyeless freak. ‘It’s fine, Hound. Thanks.’ The first swallow was no different from drinking honeyed nectar. She could almost imagine the sweet, warm liquid rehydrating her sore muscles. Back on Terra, she drank imported wine from crystal glasses. Now she was pathetically grateful for lukewarm water, recycled from who knew what, offered by the hand of a heretic.

  She was too tired to cry.

  ‘Mistress?’

  She handed him back the canteen. Her stomach sloshed with the warm water, but she didn’t care. ‘What is it?’

  Hound wrung his wrapped hands, watching her with blind eyes. ‘You are struggling to fly. I worry for you. You sweat and moan more than Etrigius ever did when he guided the ship into the secret tides.’

  Octavia’s smile was more sincere as she wiped her face with her bandana. ‘He was probably a lot better at this than I am. And he’d had more practice. I’m used to sailing within the light, not through the darkness.’

  Hound seemed to digest this. His withered, stitched eyes seemed to stare right at her. ‘Will you be all right?’ he asked.

  She hesitated, and realised she wasn’t too tired to cry at all. His concern touched her, tingling at the corners of her eyes. Of all the tainted souls on this ship, it was this abused, malformed little man that asked her the most obvious of questions – the one even Septimus avoided asking, out of his stupid, stubborn politeness.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, swallowing back the threat of tears. ‘I’ll be fi–’

  The Exalted’s decree cut across her words. ‘All crew, remain on station. Reconfigure the immaterium drive for return to the warp.’

  She sighed to herself, closing her eyes again.

  X

  FLAYER

  They called him the Flayer, for reasons he felt were obvious. It wasn’t a name he cherished, nor was it one he reviled. It was – like so many other things in his existence – simply something that happened in his presence, a matter over which he could exercise no control.

  He had unprepossessing eyes that usually failed to display any emotion beyond a distant disinterest, and a face so thin it bordered on gaunt. He worked in his armour, and laboured several times a day to cleanse and reconsecrate the layered ceramite. The scrub cloths always came away reddened by the blood that decorated his armour in random patterns, for his duty was not a clean one. His helm was white, though he rarely wore it on board the station.

  ‘Flayer,’ a weak voice pried at his attention. ‘Don’t let me die.’

  Variel turned his cold eyes down to the warrior on the surgical table. The stink of his burned skin and baked blood was a pungent musk, while the warrior’s armour of red ceramite and bronze trimmings was a cracked ruin. For several moments, the Flayer watched his brother’s life leaking out from a hundred cracks.

  ‘You are already dead,’ Variel told him. ‘Your body has just not accepted it yet.’

  The warrior’s attempt at a defiant cry emerged as a strangled choke. He managed to grip Variel’s bulky narthecium gauntlet. Bloody fingers smeared filth over the buttons and scanner display.

  ‘Please do not touch me.’ Variel gently removed his arm from the dying warrior’s grip. ‘I do not like to be touched.’

  ‘Flayer...’

  ‘And please refrain from begging. It will avail you nothing.’ Variel let his forearm hover over the warrior’s cracked breastplate. The gore-grimed narthecium clicked as it cogitated. The scanner display chimed twice. ‘You have suffered severe ruptures to one lung and both hearts. Sepsis has saturated your bloodstream with poison, straining your organs to the point of failure.’

  ‘Flayer... Please... I wish only to serve our lord...’

  Variel rested his fist by the warrior’s sweating temple. ‘I know you, Kallas Yurlon. Nothing will be lost when you expire.’ Here, he paused, but not to smile. Variel was unable to recall the last time he smiled. Not in the last decade, certainly. �
��Do you wish the Emperor’s Peace?’

  ‘How dare you mock me?’ Kallas sought to rise. Blood ran from the cracks in his armour. ‘I... will speak... with the Corpsemaster...’

  ‘No,’ Variel tensed his fist. ‘Sleep.’

  ‘I–’

  A piston’s snick sounded from the narthecium gauntlet, powering an adamantium drill-bore through the warrior’s temple with a crack, lodging within the brain. Kallas Yurlon immediately sagged, lowered back to the surgical table in the Flayer’s gentle arms.

  ‘You will not speak to Lord Garreon at all. As I said, you are already dead.’

  Variel opened his hand, lifting his fingertips from the pressure plate built into the palm of his gauntlet. The bloodied drill-spike retracted back into its housing along the Flayer’s forearm, secure in its pod of sterilising fluid.

  He keyed in a short command on his vambrace controls, triggering the deployment and activation of several more traditional tools: a las-scalpel, a motorised bone saw, and the silver claws of a thoracic vice.

  Next, he began the task of burning, cutting, spreading bone and peeling back flesh. As always, he worked in absolute silence, reluctantly breathing in the smells of incinerated muscle and exposed organs. The first progenoid came free in a sticky withdrawal, clinging trails of sealant mucus forming gooey strings between the gene-seed and its gaping cavity.

  Variel dropped the bleeding organ into a chemical preservative solution, before moving his narthecium’s tools to the dead warrior’s throat and repeating the extraction procedure. He worked quicker this time, his efficiency bordering on brutal. Through a vertical slit in the side of the neck, the Flayer inserted reinforced forceps from his vambrace kit. The cut flesh parted with a leathery rip, freeing more blood and exposing the viscera within Kallas’s neck. The second progenoid node came loose from the sinew with greater ease, trailing a few snapped veins. Variel placed the organ in the same solution as the first and sealed both of them in a glass cylinder.

  On a whim, he reactivated the laser scalpel that extended from his bracer. The post-mortem surgery was quickly completed, and Variel peeled away the harvested skin, leaving the corpse staring at the ceiling through a flayed face.

  Slowly, his cold eyes as emotionless as ever, Variel looked up. With his duty done, the Flayer’s focus diffused, spreading wide as he let his surroundings filter back into his senses. Around him, there was a carnival of noise: the shouts, the screams, the oaths and curses rising above the blood-stink.

  Variel gestured to two medicae slaves, summoning them closer. The Star of the Pantheon had been crudely burned into the flesh of their faces, and they wore aprons streaked with bodily fluids. Their augmetic limbs allowed them to serve as corpse-bearers, dragging warriors in full war plate.

  ‘Take this husk to the incinerators,’ he ordered them. As the Flayer watched the humans hauling the dead meat away, he slid the glass cylinder with its precious cargo into the storage pod sheathed to his thigh armour.

  Lastly, he cleaned his narthecium with several bursts of disinfectant spray, before drawing breath to speak a single word.

  ‘Next.’

  They came for him several hours later, as he’d known they would. The only surprise was that he faced only two. It seemed Kallas Yurlon hadn’t been as beloved by his brothers as Variel had suspected.

  ‘Hello,’ he greeted them. His voice echoed faintly in the corridor, but didn’t carry far. They’d chosen their spot well, for here in one of the station’s secondary thoroughfare spinals, few others would hear any screams or gunfire.

  ‘Flayer,’ the first one growled. ‘We have come for Kallas.’

  Variel still wore no helm. Nor did the two brother-warriors he faced, and their scarlet and black ceramite was a mirror to his own. He met their eyes in turn, taking heed of the ritual scarification blighting their faces. Both had mutilated their flesh with carvings of the Pantheon Star.

  How very telling.

  Variel spread his arms, the very image of benediction but for the lack of any warmth in his eyes. ‘How may I be of service, brothers?’

  The second warrior stepped forwards now, aiming a deactivated chainsword at the Apothecary’s throat.

  ‘You could’ve saved Kallas,’ he snarled, his bloodshot eyes unblinking.

  ‘No,’ Variel lied, ‘he was too far gone. I gave him the Emperor’s Peace.’

  ‘Deceiver,’ the warrior laughed. ‘Betrayer. Now you mock his shade with such words.’

  ‘We have come for Kallas,’ the first Legionary growled again.

  ‘Yes, I believe you mentioned that. I am not deaf.’

  ‘His spirit besieges us, demanding vengeance in his name.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Variel moved slowly, not wishing to startle his brothers into attacking, and tapped the dry leathery memento on his shoulder guard. The skinned, stretched face of Kallas Yurlon stared eyelessly back at them. ‘Here he is. He is most pleased to see you. See how he smiles?’

  ‘You...’

  If there was one thing Variel never understood about many of his brothers, it was their propensity – no, their need – to posture. Each of them seemed to consider himself the philosophical protagonist of his own saga. Their hatreds mattered more than anything else; their glories and the abuses against them had to be spoken of at every opportunity.

  Baffling.

  As his brother began to utter yet another threat, Variel went for his bolt pistol. Three shots cracked into the warrior’s chest, detonating in a storm of debris, throwing the Legionary back against the wall. Shrapnel cracked against the ceiling light, shattering it and plunging the narrow corridor into darkness. He was already running as the chainsword started up.

  Variel blind-fired back in the seconds it took his gen-hanced eyes to adjust, explosions breeding light in flickering stutters as his second volley of shells struck home. He reloaded as he sprinted, slamming a fresh magazine home and weaving around three corners in quick succession. Around the last, he waited, drawing his carving knife.

  ‘Flayer!’ the second warrior screamed after him. The thunder of running boots came closer with each heartbeat. Variel’s eyes focussed through the darkness, his weapons heavy in his hands.

  His brother rounded the corner to be met with Variel’s dagger punching into the soft armour at his collar. With an exaggerated gargle, the warrior’s forward momentum sent him sprawling, tumbling to the decking in a heap of squealing ceramite and humming armour joints.

  Variel stalked closer, his pistol aimed at his brother’s head. His eyes widened at what he saw. The warrior fought his way to his knees, and was dragging the knife from his own throat with pained, voiceless breaths. How very tenacious.

  ‘Your vocal chords are destroyed,’ Variel said. ‘Please stop trying to curse at me. It is embarrassing.’

  The warrior tried to rise again. A brutal pistol-whipping put an end to that, breaking his skull with a wet crack. Variel rested his bolter’s muzzle against the back of his fallen brother’s neck.

  ‘And blessedly, I am spared from hearing any ludicrous last words.’

  Variel spat acid onto his brother’s armour, where it began to eat into the clenched fist icon of the Red Corsairs.

  ‘I assure you, that was unintentionally symbolic,’ he told the doomed warrior, and pulled the trigger.

  Lord Garreon was a warrior that – to use a Badabian expression – wore his wounds with a smile. In his case, the expression was far from literal: he smiled about as often as his favoured apprentice, yet he kept his visage with the corruption battle had placed upon it, rather than re-engineer himself with bionics. Garreon’s face was a pale picture of tectonic ruination, the lacing scars serving only to make an ugly man uglier. The right side of his face pulled tight at his temple and cheek – the taut, dead muscles giving him a scarred, eternal sneer.

  ‘Variel, my boy.’ His voice was kind where his face was not: a grandfather’s tone, belying the massacres ordered by the ageing warrior’s thin lips.

&n
bsp; Variel did not turn to the greeting. He remained as he was, staring through the observation dome at the smoky void and the world turning below. Wraiths, little more than formless mist, drifted past the glass, the spectral suggestion of faces and fingers finding no purchase as they ghosted by. Variel ignored them with ease. The pining of lost souls was of no interest to him at all.

  ‘Hail, sire,’ he replied.

  ‘So formal?’ Garreon approached, his own armour rattling with its profusion of vials, trinkets and talismans. Variel knew the sound well. Truly, the Apothecary Lord had embraced the Chapter’s allegiance to the Pantheon.

  ‘My mind wanders,’ the younger warrior confessed.

  ‘And where does it wander? To the globe turning beneath our feet?’ Garreon paused to moisten his lips with a swipe of his quivering tongue. ‘Or the two bodies in Subsidiary Spinal Eleven?’

  Variel narrowed his eyes as he stared at the black world outside the glass. ‘They were newbloods,’ he said. ‘Weak. Worthless.’

  ‘You left them unharvested,’ his mentor pointed out. ‘Lord Huron would be less than pleased.’

  ‘Nothing of value was lost,’ Variel replied. He moved away from the edge of the observation platform, crossing to the other side. Here, the view was a deeper slice of the tempestuous, cloudy void and the metallic bulk of the station itself, reaching for kilometres in every direction. Variel watched the comings and goings of dozens of cruisers for several minutes, as well as the swimming dances of the parasitic lesser ships clinging close to each of them. The warships drifted in orbit around the station, or remained docked at its edges. The lights of the shuttle traffic painted the poisoned nebula with flickering stars racing hither and thither.

  ‘Inspiring, is it not?’ Garreon said at last. ‘To think we once ruled one world. Now, we cradle a horde of systems in our tender grip. Billions of lives. Trillions. That is how power is measured, boy: in the souls one holds in his clutches, and the lives one can end with a word.’