Night Lords Omnibus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  He was reaching for his first parchment when he heard the noise come from the antechamber.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ he asked Lissel, the young woman at the next table. She frowned at the interruption, her quill not resting in its scratching flow. Silence was rarely broken here. Lissel shook her head without looking up from her work.

  There it was again. A muffled, minute clang, the report of metal against metal.

  He looked over his shoulder, to the doorway leading into the antechamber.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Lissel murmured. ‘Just Cadry, tidying the stores. He went in a few minutes before you arrived.’

  Yeshic rose from his seat nevertheless, moving over to the closed door and keying the release code. As the portal opened on smooth hinges, nothing untoward met his questing gaze. Meritoriam Secondus had an immense storage chamber, with a shelf-forest of parchment racks, scroll tubes, ink vials and tools to mix pigments.

  He stepped inside, closing the door so the others wouldn’t be disturbed as he quietly called Cadry’s name.

  An irritating thrum in the air set his gums itching, though he couldn’t fathom its source. A machine sound, without a doubt. Perhaps the grinder pestle was malfunctioning; not an unprecedented event, by any means. Yeshic moved deeper, heading through the rows of shelving. The feeling of static in his mouth grew stronger. The resonating hum grew louder in unison. It almost sounded like the growl of awakened ceramite, consecrated in the Emperor’s name. But the Marines Errant never ventured into this wing of the fortress. Yeshic smiled at the very idea; an Errant would struggle to even fit through the doorway here.

  ‘Cadry? Cad– Ah.’ The elder sat hunched over the automated grinder, while the machine sat idle in its place on a workbench. The abrasive thrumming was everywhere now, more invasive than truly loud, strong enough to warm his eyes with subtle vibrations. He looked around for any sign of an Errant nearby, but saw nothing. All was in perfect order, bar Cadry’s slack posture.

  ‘Cadry? Are you well?’ He touched the old man’s shoulder. With a boneless slouch, Cadry fell face forwards onto the bench.

  A heart attack, then. The poor old fool. Yeshic checked for a pulse at the elder’s neck, and found nothing. His skin was still warm, though. The younger scribe muttered a prayer, stumbling over just what to say. Cadry had served with honour for seven decades. Many of the Wardens would attend his funerary rites, perhaps even one or two of the few Marines Errant remaining in Vilamus.

  Yeshic turned the body to see the elder’s face, intending to close the eyes before the funereal attendants arrived.

  Blood painted the old man’s chest. The eyes were gone. Hollow sockets wept and stared in their place, blackened by wounding, wet with fluid.

  Yeshic turned, running only a single step before hitting the hand launching against his throat. Iron-skinned and shockingly cold, the grip clenched tight, leaving him capable of nothing but spraying wordless spit from flapping lips.

  He looked up, following the arm that caught him. His attacker hung from the ceiling, armoured in ornate, ancient ceramite of a kind the serf had never seen. One of the Errant hands clutched the rim of a maintenance shaft, the other dragged the writhing serf up from the floor with no difficulty at all, no matter how the human thrashed.

  Within three beats of Yeshic’s heart, the Errant had hauled himself up into the maintenance conduit, dragging the serf with him.

  Not an Errant not an Errant not an Errant.

  ‘Do not pray...’ the warrior whispered in a tinny crackle of vox, leering with red eye lenses, ‘...to your Emperor. Or you die even slower.’

  Not an Errant... How... Who...

  ‘Who–’

  The warrior squeezed again, choking off his air. ‘And do not ask foolish questions, or I will feed you your own eyes.’

  The image of Cadry flashed back to him through his racing thoughts. The fat old man, blinded by mutilation, his eyes pulled from his head and placed upon his tongue. Maybe he’d even choked on them, before they went down...

  ‘Thank you,’ the warrior whispered. ‘Your obedience has spared you the same last meal your friend enjoyed.’

  The not-an-Errant drew a silver blade as he crouched, resting the tip beneath Yeshic’s chin.

  ‘Wait,’ the serf wept. ‘Please.’

  The warrior exhaled something like a sigh, confessing three words to the whimpering human. ‘I loathe begging.’

  He thrust the blade upwards, burying it halfway to the hilt through tongue, palate, skull and brain. Yeshic convulsed, arms spasming against the duct’s sides with quiet clangs.

  At last, the Meritoriam scribe fell still. The warrior worked quickly, cracking the sternum with the pommel of his combat blade, and hack-sawing through the ribcage with several chops. Once the ribs were broken, spread like open wings to reveal the harvest of organs beneath, the warrior kicked the corpse from the maintenance tunnel, letting it drop with a wet crack to the floor below. What had been inside the body began to leak out. That included the smell.

  He regarded his rushed handiwork: the eyeless old man, the autopsied younger one; his ninth and tenth kills since arriving less than an hour before. What a fine discovery they would make for some oblivious menial.

  The warrior paused only to clean his blade, sheathing it at his shin. The sirens chose that moment to begin.

  Curious, Talos glanced back down at the gift he’d left, but the bodies were undisturbed. The sirens raged on. It sounded like the entire monastery was crying out in alarm, which, in a sense, was exactly the truth. Somewhere in this immense fortress, either his earlier handiwork – or that of his brothers – had been discovered.

  XVIII

  INFILTRATION

  Huron’s plan had been easy to admire, as was the passion with which he’d presented it. Showing surprising humility and consideration to the one hundred warriors he was ordering to potential suicide, the Tyrant came on board the Covenant of Blood with a minimal honour guard to grant a personal address. On the Covenant’s bridge, flanked by two of his Terminator huscarls, the Corsair lord detailed his plan in full, highlighting the Night Lords’ potential avenues of assault. He even conceded the point that, ultimately, the Eighth Legion’s arrival was a fortuitous event. Their warriors were much more suited to the first phase of the invasion, and although he entrusted the results to them, he knew their finest chances of achieving victory would be through their own methods.

  Talos had watched all of this, gathered with First Claw in a loose pack around the hololithic table. The other Claws did the same. Only one Night Lord stood alone, his armour freshly repainted, diminished by his isolation yet standing proud. Ruven had no Claw, for each of them had refused him. The Exalted and its Atramentar reacted harshest of all, vocally promising to slay the betrayer if he was foolish enough to offend them even once.

  Partway through the speech, the Blood Reaver summoned a hololithic projection of the Vilamus fortress-monastery. Even the rough, flickering image ignited something akin to envy in Talos’s unwavering gaze. No fortress-monastery was the twin of any other, and Vilamus rose like an Ecclesiarchy cathedral, reinforced into a gothic bastion with staggered battlements, tiered ramparts, landing platforms and, on the highest levels, docks for warships drifting below low-orbit to be repaired at the Chapter’s sanctuary.

  ‘We could crash the Covenant into it,’ Xarl mused, ‘and it still wouldn’t make a dent.’ He carried his helm under his arm. For reasons Talos couldn’t work out, since arriving at Hell’s Iris, Xarl had taken to wearing his ceremonial helm. Its ornamentation was an echo of the Legion’s emblem, with twin sleek, chiropteran wings rising in an elegant crest.

  ‘Why are you wearing that?’ Talos asked quietly, during the mission briefing.

  Xarl looked at the helm in the crook of his arm, then scowled at the prophet. ‘No harm in a little pride, brother.’

  Talos let it go. Perhaps Xarl had a point.

  Huron paused to clear bile from his throat. Gears clanked in
his neck and chest as he swallowed. ‘A fortress-monastery is a defensive bastion like no other. Each of you knows this, but even such strongholds have degrees of capability. Vilamus is no provincial castle on the Imperium’s border. The hololithic simulations of even the entire Corsair armada attacking from orbit make for grim viewing. Even with our fleet, that battle would not earn any of us much glory, I assure you.’

  Several of the gathered warriors chuckled.

  ‘You are right to question why I am using you so harshly,’ Huron allowed. ‘And that is because if your Legion cannot complete the first steps of the invasion alone, then the siege itself has no hope of success. I am using you, but not as a master uses a slave. I am using you as a general wields a weapon.’

  ‘What’s in it for us?’ one of the Bleeding Eyes called out. The question elicited a chorus of hissing chuckles from the others. Thirty of them in all, most crouched to accommodate their clawed feet, though several – the least-changed among them – stood tall.

  Huron didn’t smile. He inclined his head, as if acknowledging the question’s wisdom. ‘Some might say allowing your ship to enter my dock would be reward enough. But I am not selfish with the spoils of war. You know what I want from this assault. The Eighth Legion is free to plunder whatever it wishes, as long as the Marines Errant supply of gene-seed is left untouched. Take armour, relics, prisoners – I care for none of it. But if I find the gene vaults harvested, I will withdraw my amnesty. The Covenant will not simply be fired upon and chased from Corsair space as it was the last time you... stretched... my patience. It will be destroyed.’

  The Exalted dragged its armoured bulk forwards, sending minute tremors through the deck. Massive claws came to rest on the table’s surface, and tumourous black eyes half-lidded themselves, warding against even the anaemic light of the hololithic projectors.

  ‘Every Claw will take part in the surface assault. The only warriors remaining on the ship will be the Atramentar.’ The creature paused to drag air and spittle back through its teeth. ‘I will deploy each Claw in drop-pods.’

  ‘And how do we breach the orbital defences?’ Karsha, the leader of Second Claw, addressed his question to Huron rather than the Exalted. ‘I assume you are not laying us all on the altar of fate in the hope a handful of us survive to do your bidding.’

  Huron nodded again. ‘I understand your scepticism, but this offensive has been years in the planning. Raider fleets have coordinated across the subsector for years, forcing the Marines Errant into increasingly wide patrol routes. For almost a decade, the Chapter has reached farther and farther from their fortress, its crusading fleets devoted to watching over vulnerable Imperial shipping routes. I have sacrificed more than my fair share of ships to engineer this opportunity, and committed more warriors to early graves than I care to admit. The fortress-monastery is defended by – at most – a single company’s worth of Imperial Space Marines. Their fleet is gone, scattered across the subsector. All that remains are the orbital defence platforms, and though they are formidable, never in the Red Corsairs’ history has such a prize been open for the taking.’

  Huron’s smile was every bit as predatory as any of the Night Lords. ‘Do you believe I would be so careless as to simply hurl warriors at the world, ruining our one chance of a clean assault? No. What is your name, Legionary?’

  ‘Karsha.’ The Night Lord didn’t bother to salute. ‘Karsha the Unsworn.’

  ‘Karsha.’ Huron gestured to the hololithic with his oversized power claw. The immense talons curled through a cluster of radar dishes mounted on one of the fortress’s eastern walls. ‘The sun, Vila, is being encouraged to bleed, haemorrhaging great flares into the void. Tides of solar wind and magnetic field disruption already flow through the Vilamus system. When the tides spill over the system’s worlds, each will suffer geomagnetic storms, lighting the sky with aurorae at the planets’ poles, and...’

  Karsha growled in reluctant admiration. ‘And slaying all vox and auspex on the surface.’

  ‘And in orbit.’ Huron corrected. ‘Throughout the entire system, magnetic interference will butcher all scanning and transmission. The storm will leave our own assault practically blind, for we cannot rely on our own instruments when we commit to the siege. Infiltrating Vilamus will be no trial for any of you. The first phase should not test you at all. The second, however, will be when complications set in. We can discuss that later.’

  Talos stepped forward. ‘How will you trigger the sun to initiate a coronal mass ejection?’ Though he aimed the question at Huron, his gaze drifted to Ruven at the crowd’s edge. ‘Such a thing cannot be artificially bred.’

  Ruven didn’t meet his eyes, but Huron did. ‘Nothing is impossible, prophet. My warp-weavers are capable of more than you realise.’ He spoke the words without boasting, merely stating a fact. ‘It is a small thing, in truth, to reach into the heart of star and fire the arithmetic of fusion. My men know their task, and will die before failing me.’

  ‘If you are able to blind the Marines Errant fortress-monastery,’ Karsha affirmed, ‘then we will not fail.’ Grunts and murmurs of assent travelled through the ranks. Xarl was grinning; Mercutian muttered to himself; while Uzas stared off into the middle distance, his gaze slack and unfocussed. Cyrion met Talos’s glance.

  ‘Just as you said,’ he agreed. ‘We’re fighting this one our way.’

  The prophet nodded, but didn’t reply.

  The same night, the Covenant of Blood broke dock and entered the warp, making for the Vila system.

  The drop-pods fell nine days later.

  As he moved through the labyrinth of maintenance tunnels and ventilation shafts, he kept one thought primed in his mind: as predators, they stood a chance; as prey, they’d not last a single night.

  First Claw’s drop-pod had come down to the east of the fortress, driving home in one ravine among a clawed landscape of many. Erosion and tectonics had enjoyed millennia to work their influence, giving the world’s wastelands a scarred and hostile face. Once they’d climbed the canyon’s wall, they’d headed west at a sustainable sprint, scattering across the empty plateaus after nothing more than a few irritated farewells.

  With almost two hundred kilometres of lifeless, waterless barren landscape to cover, Talos had reached the walls of the fortress-monastery three nights after leaving the canyon. He used his gauntlets and boots to smash handholds in the fortress walls, and gained access through a wide-mouthed heat exchange venting tunnel. The flames were industrial – true fire, rather than the corrosive, clinging nightmare of a flame weapon’s breath – and he walked through the thrashing orange heat with impunity, letting it scorch his armour and the skulls that hung from it.

  Of his brothers’ fates, he had no idea.

  True stealth had never been a viable option for the assault’s first phase. The battle armour of a Legiones Astartes warrior hardly allowed for one to become a consummate, untraceable assassin, not while it growled as loud as an idling engine, rendered him close to three metres in height, and bled a power signature detectable to even the crudest auspex readers. When the Eighth Legion went to war, it wasn’t under a veil of secrecy and the flawed hope of going unseen. Leave such cowardly hunts to the soulless bitch-creatures spawned by the Callidus Temple in their gestation vats.

  He flicked a glance at his retinal chron. Two minutes had passed since the sirens began their tumultuous whine. The prophet consulted an archived hololith schematic on his left eye lens as he ran in a crouch through the maintenance tunnel. A large chamber waited ahead, almost certainly the hub of Chapter serf operations on this level. Killing everyone present but for a few screaming, fleeing survivors would surely attract some attention.

  Not far now.

  Lucoryphus claimed no great ties to being his gene-sire’s favoured pet, nor did he care that other warriors lauded themselves as part of the primarch’s inner circle. Like most of his brethren, his perspectives aligned along a different route in the generations since Curze’s death. He w
as a Raptor, first and foremost, and a Bleeding Eye second. Thirdly, distantly, he was a Night Lord. He did not cast his Legion bond aside, but nor did he drape himself in icons of Nostramo’s winged skull.

  It was just a planet, after all. A sizeable minority of the Legion weren’t even drawn from there. They were Terran, born on the Throneworld, descended directly from the bloodlines that begat the whole human race.

  Vorasha was Earthborn, beneath the daemon-faced armour, the blood-weeping eyes, and the irritating cackles. This, too, meant nothing. Lucoryphus knew Vorasha thought as he did: Raptors first, Bleeding Eyes second, allegiance to the ancient Legions last. What was a birth world, anyway? Such details meant nothing. It maddened him to see others put so much stock in it; always, they looked to the past, refusing to face up to the glories of the present and conquests of the future.

  The prophet was the worst of all. His grotesquely distorted perception of the primarch soured Lucoryphus’s stomach. Curze killed because Curze wished to kill. His was a rotten soul. In death’s vindication, he taught his idiotic lesson: that the evils of the species deserve to be destroyed.

  The Raptor gave a grating cackle each time he thought of it. If the lesson was so vital, so pure, so necessary, why did Curze leave a Legion of murderers sailing the stars in his name? He died a broken thing, a husk of himself, with hatred the only emotion strong enough to pierce his own confusion. He died to teach a lesson to a father already slain; he died to show a truth that every soul in the empire already knew. That was not vindication, it was stupidity. Proud, blind, and deluded.

  Primarchs. He wanted to spit at the thought of them. Useless, flawed creatures. Let the dead ones decay in poetic scripture throughout history’s pages. Let those that survived dwell in the highest eyries of the immaterium, singing the ethereal praises of mad gods. He had a war to win, unshackled to failures from a time of legend.