Night Lords Omnibus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Of the mortal crew, the only people she knew were Septimus, Maruc and Hound. The first of that list... Well, she had no desire to see him at the moment, anyway. The last time they’d met had been acutely uncomfortable. She was almost glad Cyrion had interrupted them, not that she was even sure what he’d interrupted.

  The second name on the list was usually with Septimus, off-ship and engaged in some nefarious activity neither of them wanted to explain. That left her with Hound, who was – being fair to him – hardly the most cultured of conversationalists. Her royal blood might be watered down by the relative status of her lineage, but she was still a Terran noble, and had played hostess on several occasions to members of the Throneworld’s ruling class.

  Her attendant’s main avenue of discussion was his own mistress. He seemed interested in little else, though he was good for helping her learn more Nostraman. The viperous tongue deviated from any possible Gothic roots more than any human language she’d encountered, but once she stopped seeking similarities, it became easier to begin afresh with a clearer outlook.

  Still, boredom was always peering over her shoulder. Navigators were not born to sit idle.

  Beyond Hound, all she had to distract herself were the endless repair updates, but even they’d dried to a trickle now the Covenant was ready to break dock.

  Her door proximity sensor tolled again. Octavia caught herself halfway to reaching to check her bandana. Some habits shouldn’t be developed, and that one was starting to stick. All too often she felt her hand twitch when Hound spoke to her, and she’d keep touching her covered eye with every loud noise echoing down from higher decks.

  Hound stumbled his way around her messy chamber, tilting his face up to the viewscreen by the bulkhead.

  ‘It is Septimus,’ he said. ‘He is alone.’

  The Navigator made a point of studying her personal viewscreen, the one mounted on the armrest of her throne. Schematics, essays and journal entries wiped across the screen as she cycled through the Covenant’s datacore. The updated feed from Hell’s Iris swelled the ship’s onboard repository of knowledge with a great deal of recent lore about the local subsectors.

  ‘Mistress?’

  ‘I heard you.’ Octavia frowned at the glowing screen, and typed VILAMUS for the third time, refining the search.

  ‘Shall I grant him entrance, mistress?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, thank you. Do you know what Vilamus is?’

  ‘No, mistress.’ Hound moved away from the door, resuming his place, sat with his back against the wall.

  DATACORE MATCH blinked across her black screen in aggressively green script. She activated the entry, unlocking a stream of scrolling text and numbers.

  ‘It would be useful,’ she sighed, ‘if I could read Badabian.’

  Blurry orbital images accompanied the archive data. The Navigator breathed a little ‘Huh’ of surprise as the picts resolved to show a world no different from a thousand others – with one incredible exception. ‘I don’t see why we’re... Oh. Oh, Throne of the God-Emperor... they can’t mean to attack this.’

  Octavia looked up at Hound, who was busy toying with the loose end of a wrist bandage.

  ‘Hound,’ she said. ‘I think I know what Vilamus is.’

  Septimus headed to Blackmarket, determined not to let his mood get the better of him. Octavia was a fey creature even in her calmest moments. Trying to understand her was like trying to count the stars.

  Several of the traders there greeted him with nods, a few with sneers, and many more with smiles. The massive chamber was a hub of activity, with new wares hawked as soon as they were smuggled on board from Hell’s Iris. Several of the table stalls even had thuggish bodyguards on hand to defend presumably valuable merchandise. The serf raised his eyebrow as he passed a table laid out with what looked like plundered Imperial Guard weaponry – even a chainsword, scaled to fit a human hand. But that wasn’t what drew his eye.

  Septimus gestured to the stocky, long form of a lasrifle. Its body and stock looked to be formed of plain, dull metal. Scratches and burn marks along the rifle’s length showed both signs of older wear and more recent desecration, likely the removal of all Imperial aquilas.

  ‘Vulusha?’ he asked the ageing merchant in the ragged Legion uniform. ‘Vulusha sethrishan?’

  The man replied with a patently false laugh, naming a prince’s ransom in trade items.

  Septimus’s smile was equally insincere. ‘That’s quite a price. It’s a rifle, my friend. Not a wife.’

  The trader picked up the chainsword, his knuckly fingers wrapping the hilt in an exaggerated grip that would see him disarmed in a heartbeat in an actual fight. With awkward chops, he cut the air a few times.

  ‘I have more to trade than most of these others. How about this blade? Better than that chopping cleaver you keep strapped to your shin, isn’t it? And look, it has perfect balance. See? This was once a hero’s blade.’

  ‘It’s a chainsword, Melash. No chainsword has perfect balance. They’re not balanced at all.’

  ‘Why do you come to harass me, eh?’

  ‘Because I want the rifle.’

  Melash tongued a sore on his lip. ‘Very well. But the gun was also the weapon of a hero. You know I would never lie to you.’

  ‘Wrong again.’ Septimus reached out to tap the Munitorum number code in faded stencilling along the rifle’s stock. ‘It looks like standard-issue Guard gear to me. What comes next, old man? Will you tell me you have a family to feed?’

  The trader sighed. ‘You wound me.’

  ‘I’m sure I do.’ Septimus moved aside as a small crowd of slaves moved past. Blackmarket had never looked busier. It was almost disorienting to be in the middle of so much life, like a real city night-market. Torches lit up dozens of unfamiliar faces. ‘Just sell me the damn gun, Melash. What do you want in trade?’

  The other man sucked his lower lip. ‘Can you get me batteries? I need power cells, Septimus. Everyone is bringing lamp packs on board, but energy cells will be in short supply a few weeks after we set sail. And caffeine. Can you get me some powdered caffeine from the station?’

  Septimus watched him closely. ‘Now tell me what you really want, and stop avoiding it in case I refuse.’

  The old man gave a more honest, but more awkward, smile. ‘A labour trade?’

  Septimus raised an eyebrow. His bionic eye clicked and purred as it sought to mirror the expression. ‘Keep talking.’

  Melash scratched at his bald pate. ‘Some trouble with a gang on the lower decks. Hokroy’s crew, a new pack from Ganges. A lot of the new blood, they haven’t learned the laws, yet. They stole from me. Not much, but I didn’t have much to begin with. Some coins, my pistol, some of my wife’s jewellery... She’s dead, dead in the Angel attack, but... I’d like it back, if you can arrange it.’

  Septimus held out his hand. Melash spat into his own palm, and grasped the serf’s hand in a shake.

  ‘I meant give me the rifle, Melash.’

  ‘Oh. Ah, I see.’ The man wiped his hand along his uniform trousers. Septimus, wincing, did the same.

  ‘Delightful,’ he muttered. ‘Did you get a strap when you stole the rifle?’

  ‘A strap?’

  ‘A strap, to carry it over your shoulder.’

  ‘A strap, he says. I’m not an Imperial supply depot, boy.’ The trader handed him the lasgun. ‘It needs juice, by the way. I’ve not charged its power pack yet. Good hunting down there.’

  Septimus moved back into the crowd, passing Arkiah’s stall. The widower’s table, once Blackmarket’s hub, stood at the heart of the hurricane: a zone of stillness while chaos reigned all around.

  He halted at the barren display. ‘Where is Arkiah?’ he asked a nearby woman.

  ‘Septimus,’ she greeted him with a shy smile. Despite being old enough to be his grandmother, she reached up to straighten her tangled grey hair. ‘Have you not heard? Arkiah has left us.’

  ‘Left?’ He scanned the crowd
for a moment. ‘To live aboard the station? Or to dwell deeper within the ship?’

  ‘He...’ she hesitated once she saw the rifle in his gloved grip. ‘He was killed a handful of nights after the Legion master came here to chastise him.’

  ‘That was weeks ago. No one told me.’

  Her shrug bordered on demure. ‘You have been busy, Septimus. Chasing the Navigator and gathering for the Legion, I hear. Children and mothers... How many have you brought on board? When will they be released from the slave holds?’

  He waved the questions aside. ‘Tell me about Arkiah.’

  The old woman made a face as the cold air graced one of her decaying teeth. ‘When the Legion lord came, it made Arkiah a pariah in the nights that followed. People thought it bad luck to go near him, lest they risk earning the Legion’s displeasure as he had. From there, it got worse – he started insisting he was seeing his daughter again, running through the corridors beyond Blackmarket. After that, he was always alone. We found his body a week later.’

  She made no effort to hide her feelings from him, or the hurt in her eyes. Killings between the human crew were a fact of life on board the Covenant, frequent enough to put the crime figures in an Imperial hive to shame. Bodies showed up beaten and stabbed regularly enough for few mortals to bat an eyelid unless it was someone they knew. But then, everyone knew Arkiah, even if only because of his daughter.

  ‘How did he die? What marks did you find on him?’

  ‘He’d been gutted. We found him sat against a wall in one of the granary silos. Eyes open, mouth closed, one of his daughter’s hair-trinkets in his hand. His insides were out, scattered over his lap and the floor nearby.’

  Uzas. The thought rose unbidden, and Septimus fought to prevent it reaching his lips. The old woman didn’t need to hear it, though. She saw it in his eyes.

  ‘You know who did this.’ She peered at him. ‘Don’t you? One of the Legion, perhaps. Maybe even your master.’

  He faked nonchalance with an underplayed shrug. ‘Talos would have skinned him and strung him up in Blackmarket, just as he’d promised. You should know that; he’s done it before. If this was the Legion’s doing, it was one of the others.’

  Uzas.

  It could be any of them, but the name stuck like a parasite as soon as it entered his mind. Uzas.

  ‘I have to go.’ He forced a smile. ‘Thank you, Shalla.’

  He didn’t consider himself a killer, though the gods on both sides of this war knew he was a murderer many times over. Duty called, and its calls often involved the fyceline-stinking thunder of gunfire in closed spaces, or the hacking crunch of a machete smacking into flesh. An unpleasant tingle crawled through the fingers of his right hand each time he recalled the grating nastiness of a machete blade sunk into flesh, only to be stopped by bone. He was just a man – it often took a second or third try to get through someone’s arm, especially if they were waving it around, trying to claw at his face.

  But he still didn’t consider himself a killer. Not really.

  In addition to clutching this denial around him, as if it offered some kind of protection, he took a faintly macabre pride in the fact he’d never enjoyed killing anyone. Not yet, at least. Most of the people who’d died at his hands in the last decade were fair game, one way or the other, because they’d simply been fighting for the enemy.

  He could even salve his conscience when it came to the recent kidnappings, telling himself – and his victims – that life aboard the Covenant was immeasurably better than the Corsair hellhole he was abducting them from.

  But this was different. Somehow, premeditation was the least of it. The entire endeavour, from agreement to commencement, set his skin crawling.

  Octavia. Too long in her presence. Too many hours spent sitting with her, discussing life aboard the Covenant, being forced to examine and analyse his existence, instead of pushing ahead, outrunning the guilt, protected by familiar denial.

  Once, not long ago, she’d asked him his name. ‘Not “Septimus”,’ she’d laughed when he said it. ‘What was your name before?’

  He hadn’t told her, because it no longer mattered. He was Septimus, the Seventh, and she was Octavia, the Eighth. Her former name hardly mattered, either: Eurydice Mervallion was dead. Did her family ties mean anything? Did her bloodline’s wealth make any difference any more? And what of the fine manners she’d been taught as a scion of the Terran aristocracy?

  The Covenant shaped them now. Septimus was a construct of these black corridors, a pale man who toiled for traitors, clutching two pistols, walking through the dark bowels of a blasphemous ship with a mind to commit murder. He was a pirate, a pilot, an artificer... and a heretic as truly as those he served.

  It wasn’t that the thoughts themselves were so sour; it was that he was thinking them at all. Damn that woman. Why was she doing this to him? Did she even know she was doing it? For weeks now, she’d refused to even see him. What the hell had he done wrong? She was the one whose questions dredged through silt best left untouched.

  The door to First Claw’s armoury parted before him on oiled hydraulics. He looked down at the lasrifle in his hands, checking it over one last time before giving it to its new owner.

  ‘Maruc, I have something fo... Lord?’

  Talos stood by his weapon rack, while Maruc worked with a hand-held broach, working the toothed tool along the side of the Night Lord’s pauldron. Hardly a tall man, Maruc needed to stand on a stool in order to reach.

  ‘Minor damage,’ Talos said. Unhelmed, he turned his black eyes upon Septimus. ‘I was sparring with Xarl. Where did you find a Kantrael-pattern Imperial Guard lasrifle?’

  ‘Blackmarket. It’s... a gift for Maruc.’

  Talos tilted his head, something vulturine creeping across his gaze. ‘How fares the harvest?’

  ‘The slave holds are swelling again, my lord. Finding untainted children has been a challenge, though. Mutants abound on Hell’s Iris.’

  The Night Lord grunted in agreement. ‘That is the truth. But what is wrong? You are uneasy. Do not waste time lying to me, I can see it etched on your face and inscribed within your voice.’

  Septimus was long-used to his master’s blunt, immediate honesty. Replying in kind was the only way to deal with Talos.

  ‘Arkiah is dead. He was disembowelled and left in a grain chamber.’

  The Night Lord didn’t move. Maruc continued to work. ‘The void-born’s father?’ Talos asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who killed him?’

  Septimus shook his head without any other answer.

  ‘I see,’ Talos said quietly. Silence resumed, but for the metallic rasp of Maruc’s broach scraping at the armour’s imperfections. Presumably, he had no idea what they were saying, for he didn’t speak a word of Nostraman. ‘What else?’

  Septimus placed the lasgun on Maruc’s workbench. When he faced Talos again, it was with one eye narrowed, and his bionic eye dilated in sympathetic unity.

  ‘How did you know there was more, lord?’

  ‘A guess. Now speak.’

  ‘I have to kill some people. Crew. No one important.’

  Talos nodded, but his expression showed no sign of conceding to the point. ‘Why do they need to die?’

  ‘A trade agreement I made in Blackmarket. They’re Ganges crew, and some of the newbloods are enjoying the lawless lower decks a little too much.’

  ‘Tell me their names.’

  ‘The gang leader is Hokroy. That’s all I know.’

  Talos still stared. ‘And you assumed I would just allow you to do this? To wander the lower decks alone, murdering other members of the crew?’

  ‘It... hadn’t occurred to me that you would find fault with it, lord.’

  ‘Ordinarily, I wouldn’t.’ The Night Lord grunted as he overlooked the repairs to his shoulder guard. ‘Enough, thank you.’ Maruc got down from the stool. ‘It is not the crew’s place to dispense justice, Septimus. It was not their place to kill Arkiah
, nor yours to hunt down a pack of thieves. Times are changing, and we need to change with them. The new crew, those from Ganges, need to be faced with the consequences of lawlessness. The Exalted’s choice to ignore the actions of mortals on board is no longer viable. We have too many new souls walking the hallways, and too many old souls used to living without consequence.’

  Talos paused for a moment, striding over to where his helm lay on Septimus’s work table. ‘I believe it is time the Legion exercised more control over its subjects, reinstating the premise of iron law. Slaves cannot be given the keys to the kingdom. Anarchy is the result.’ His smile was crooked, and more than a little bittersweet. ‘Trust me, I have seen it before.’

  ‘Nostramo?’

  ‘Yes. Nostramo.’ The warrior fastened his helm into place. Septimus listened to the snake-hiss of seals locking tight at the collar. ‘I will deal with this, as I should have dealt with it weeks ago.’

  ‘Lord, I–’

  ‘No. You must do nothing. This is the Legion’s work, Septimus, not yours. Now, ensure you are ready for the coming siege. We sail for Vilamus in mere days.’

  The serf looked to his master. ‘Is it true, what they say on the station?’

  Talos snorted softly. ‘That depends what they say on the station.’

  ‘That Vilamus is an Adeptus Astartes fortress-monastery. That the Blood Reaver’s entire fleet is laying siege to one of the best-defended worlds in the Imperium.’

  Talos checked his weapons, before mag-locking them to his armour – the bolter to his thigh, the blade to his back.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That is all true.’

  ‘Are you not concerned about potential losses, lord?’

  The Legionary lifted a shoulder in the barest shrug. It sent skulls rattling against his armour, talking to one another in jawless clicks. ‘No. All we have to do is stay alive, for the real battle will come after. That’s when we’ll bleed, Septimus. When we retake the Echo of Damnation.’

  XVI

  GAMBITS

  The mood in Blackmarket was more subdued than usual, and it didn’t take her long to see why. The reason – the seven skinless reasons – hung above everyone’s heads, suspended from the ceiling on corroded chains.