Night Lords Omnibus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘You sound just like he did,’ Talos said. ‘Gasping through dying lungs, panting like a beaten dog. And you look the same, eyes wide and flickering, dawning awareness of your coming death breaking through the pain and panic.’

  He slid the blade’s tip into the sorcerer’s mouth. Blood gouted onto the silver metal. ‘This is the fulfilment of a promise, “brother”. You killed Secondus, you caused harm to sworn servants of the Eighth Legion, and you betrayed us once, just as you surely would again.’

  He kept the sword in the sorcerer’s mouth, feeling each flinch as Ruven split his lips and tongue on the blade’s edges.

  ‘Any last words?’ Xarl grinned down at the fallen sorcerer.

  Incredibly, he struggled. Ruven thrashed against his confines, against the inevitability of his own demise, but strength had fled, carried out by his spilling blood. Half-summoned warp-frost plastered his gauntleted fingers to the floor.

  First Claw remained with their prey until it died, wheezing out its final breath, finally resting back onto the deck.

  ‘Variel,’ Talos said quietly.

  The Apothecary stepped forwards. ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘Skin the body. I want his flayed bones to hang from chains, above the occulus.’

  ‘As you wish, brother.’

  ‘Octavia.’

  She stopped chewing her bottom lip. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Return to your chambers and prepare to sail the Sea of Souls. I will do what I can to ensure you are not overexerted, but the journey will not be an easy one.’

  She wiped sweaty palms on her trousers; her nose still wrinkled at the sight of Ruven’s bisected body. Variel on his knees, cutting away armour and going to work with a flesh-saw, didn’t exactly help.

  ‘What’s our destination?’ she asked.

  Talos called up an image on the central hololithic. Glittering stars cast a malignant glow down on upturned faces and faceplates.

  ‘I want to return to the Eye, and make contact with some of the other Eighth Legion warbands. But for now, I do not care where we go. Anywhere but here, Octavia. Just get us there alive.’

  She saluted for the first time in her life; fist over her heart, the way the Legion’s warriors once saluted the Exalted.

  ‘Quaint.’ Talos’s black eyes glinted in the reflected artificial starlight. ‘To your station, Navigator.’

  This time, she performed a Terran curtsey, as if she were back in the ballrooms of the distant Throneworld.

  ‘Aye, my lord.’

  Once she’d left the bridge, Talos turned to his brothers. ‘I will return soon. If you need me, I will be with the tech-priest.’

  ‘Wait, Talos,’ Variel called, wrist-deep in the traitor’s chest. ‘What should I do with his gene-seed?’

  ‘Destroy it.’

  Variel squeezed, bursting the organ in his fist.

  The Echo’s Hall of Reflection echoed, just as the Covenant’s Hall of Remembrance had echoed before it, with divine industry. Red Corsair plunder was dumped on the floor to be cleansed when Deltrian had time to attend to such insignificant details. Meanwhile, he observed his servitor army installing his precious Legion relics in places of pride.

  The loss of every single artefact caused him a categorised host of digitally-interpreted approximations of negative emotion – what a human might call regret – but he was pleased with the modest horde of equipment he’d managed to salvage.

  On an exceedingly positive note, the Echo of Damnation boasted an extremely well-appointed chamber for housing the treasures of his trade, and although rot had set in across the ship during its years in the Corsairs’ clutches, nothing was ruined beyond the application of careful restoration and routine maintenance.

  Deltrian passed a life support pod, stroking a steel finger down the glass. The way a man might tap to catch the attention of a pet fish, Deltrian’s fingertip tink-tink-tinked on the glass as he admired one of the true gems in his collection. The Titan princeps, naked and hobbled, drifted unconscious in the amniotic ooze, curled almost foetal around the input/output cables implanted within his bowels and belly.

  The sleeping man twitched at the second set of taps, as if he could actually hear the greeting. That was impossible, of course. Given the amount of narcotics flooding the princeps’s bloodstream, he was locked in the deepest coils of a chemical coma. If he had been even remotely conscious, well, the pain would be indescribable, and almost certainly a detriment to sanity.

  Deltrian watched the man twitch again. He made a note to monitor his unconscious ward closely in the coming nights, as they all acclimatised to their new sanctuary. The tech-adept moved on.

  Lifter servitors were heaving one of the two saved sarcophagi into stasis racks. This one... This one caused Deltrian some degree of concern. Legiones Astartes One-Two-Ten; preferred appellation: Talos was in command now, and the existence of this particular sarcophagus directly contravened his emotive desires expressed at a past juncture.

  Still, such an eventuality would be dealt with when the time arose. Deltrian considered the sarcophagus to be his finest work: a perfect representation of the warrior within. The Night Lord image engraved on the burnished platinum stood in a posture matching representations of heroic and mythic figures from at least sixteen other human cultures, with his limbs and armour sculpted to exacting standards. His helmed head was arched back to suggest some mythic roar of triumph aimed up at the heavens, while he clutched the helms of fallen warriors in each hand. His boot rested upon a third, signifying his absolute victory.

  Yes, indeed. Deltrian was adamantly proud of his work with this particular unit, especially in the ferociously complex surgeries required to save the living remnant’s life during the one and only time it had conceded to activation.

  The tech-priest froze as the immense double doors opened on grinding hydraulics. In a curiously human gesture, he reached to pull his hood up around his features.

  ‘Greetings, Talos,’ he said, not turning around.

  ‘Explain yourself.’

  That made him turn. Not the anger in the prophet’s voice, for there was none to be heard, but the gentility of the demand, that was most intriguing.

  ‘I infer that you reference the continued existence of Sarcophagus Ten-Three. Correct?’

  The prophet’s black eyes flickered first, then his pale features turned to follow. He stared at the ornately rendered coffin for exactly six and a half seconds.

  ‘Explain yourself,’ he said again, colder now, his voice undergoing a significant reduction in vocalised temperance. Deltrian decided to frame this in the simplest terms.

  ‘Your orders after the engagement at Crythe were countermanded by a higher authority.’

  The prophet narrowed his eyes. ‘The Exalted would never order such a thing. His relief at Malcharion’s destruction was palpable. Satisfaction poured off him in waves, tech-adept. Trust me, I saw it myself when I informed him.’

  Deltrian waited for an acceptable juncture in which to interject his own words. ‘Incorrect assumption. The higher authority you are referencing is not the higher authority I inferred. The order to repair and sustain the life of the warrior within Sarcophagus Ten-Three did not originate with the Exalted. It was a command issued by Legiones Astartes Distinctus-One-Ten/Previous-One.’

  Talos shook his head. ‘Who?’

  Deltrian hesitated. He didn’t know the warrior’s preferred appellation, for he’d never been told of it. ‘The... Atramentar warrior, first of the Exalted’s bodyguards, Tenth Company, previously of First Company.’

  ‘Malek? Malek ordered it?’

  Deltrian flinched back. ‘The modulation of your voice indicates anger.’

  ‘No. I am surprised, that is all.’ Talos returned his gaze to the enshrined sarcophagus, already being attached to stasis feeds. ‘Is he alive in there?’

  Deltrian lowered his head and raised it, in the traditional human signifier for positive agreement.

  ‘Did you just nod?’ Talos aske
d.

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘It looked like a bow.’

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘So he’s alive?’

  Deltrian despaired, sometimes. Slowed by their organic flaws, these Night Lords were woefully difficult to deal with.

  ‘Yes. This unit is ready for activation, and the warrior within is – as you say – alive.’

  ‘Why wasn’t I told of this? I walked the Covenant’s Hall of Remembrance many times. Why was his sarcophagus hidden?’

  ‘The orders were to maintain silence. It was believed you would react violently to the knowledge if exposed to it.’

  Talos shook his head again, though the tech-adept guessed it was an accompaniment to thought, rather than an indication of disagreement.

  ‘Will you react with violence?’ the tech-adept asked. ‘This is sacred ground, already consecrated to the Machine-God, in honour of the oath between the Mechanicum and the Eighth Legion.’

  The prophet’s gaze lingered on the Dreadnought’s sarcophagus.

  ‘Do I look like a violent soul?’ he asked.

  Deltrian was unable to discern the exact ratio of sardonic humour to genuine inquiry contained in the Night Lord’s question. With no comprehension of the question’s nature, he couldn’t formulate a customised answer. Lacking any other recourse, he answered honestly.

  ‘Yes.’

  Talos snorted, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. ‘Awaken Malcharion if you are able,’ he said. ‘Then we will discuss what must be done.’

  EPILOGUE

  FATE

  The prophet sees them die.

  He sees them fall, one by one, until at last he stands alone, possessing nothing but a broken blade in his bleeding hands.

  A warrior with no brothers.

  A master with no slaves.

  A soldier with no sword.

  Cyrion is not the first to die, but his death is the worst to witness. The inhuman fire, burning dark with alien witchlight, eats at his motionless corpse.

  An outstretched hand rests with its fingers blackened and curled, just shy of a fallen bolter.

  Xarl, the strongest of them, should be the last to die, not the first. Dismembered, reduced to hunks of armour-wrapped meat, his death is neither quick nor painless, and offers only a shadow of the glory he so craved.

  It is not a death he would have welcomed, but his enemies – those few that still draw breath when the sun finally rises after the longest night of their lives – will remember him until their own eventual ends. That, at least, is a comfort he can take beyond the grave.

  Mercutian is not the last, either. Miserable, loyal Mercutian, standing over his brothers’ bodies, defending them against shrieking xenos bitch-creatures that take him to pieces with curved blades.

  He fights past the point of death, fuelling his body with stubborn anger when organs and blood and air are no longer enough.

  When he falls, it’s with an apology on his lips.

  Variel dies with Cyrion.

  The watcher feels a strange sorrow at that; Cyrion and Variel are not close, can barely stand to hear each others’ voices. The same flames that embrace the former leap to embrace the latter, bringing death for one and pain for the other.

  Variel dies unarmed, and he is the only one to do so.

  Uzas is the last. Uzas, his soul etched with god-runes even if his armour is not.

  He is the last to fall, his axe and gladius bathed red in stinking alien blood. Shadows dance in a closing circle around him, howling madness from inhuman throats. He meets them with cries of his own: first of rage, then of pain, and at last, of laughter.

  The Navigator covers both her secrets in black, but only one can be so easily hidden. As she runs through the night-time city streets, beneath starlight kinder to her pale skin than the Covenant’s un-light could ever be, she looks over her shoulder for signs of pursuit.

  For now, there are none.

  The watcher feels her relief, even though this is a dream, and she cannot see him.

  Breathless, hiding, she checks her secrets, ensuring both are safe. The bandana is still in place, sheathing her invaluable gift from those who would never understand. He watches as her shivering hands stray down her body, resting at her second secret.

  Pale fingers stroke a swollen belly, barely concealed by her black jacket. The watcher knows that coat – it belongs to Septimus.

  Voices shout for her, challenging and cursing in the same breath. A tall figure appears at the mouth of the alley. He is armoured lightly, for pursuit and the running gunfights of a street battle.

  ‘Hold, heretic, in the name of the Holy Inquisition.’

  Octavia runs again, cradling her rounded stomach as gunfire cracks at her heels.

  The prophet opened his eyes.

  Around him, nothing more than a chamber – the cold comfort of his personal cell. The walls were already touched by Nostraman cuneiform, the flowing script written in some places, carved in others. The same etchings and scratchings were visible on the warrior’s own armour, scrawled in mindless, prophectic decoration.

  The dagger fell from his hand to clatter on the floor, leaving the final rune incomplete. He knew the sigil, and it wasn’t one drawn from his birth-tongue.

  A slanted eye stared back at him from the wall. It wept a single, unfinished tear.

  An eldar rune, symbolising the grief of a goddess and the defiance of a species exiled to sail the stars.

  Months of fever-dreaming suddenly made sense. He turned to a spiral carved into the steel wall, ringed by a crude circle ruined by its own elliptic sides.

  Only it was not a spiral, and not a circle. It was a vortex that stared with one malignant eye, and a presence in orbit around it.

  He traced his fingers along the orbiting oval. What circles the Great Eye, trapped within its grip?

  ‘The Song of Ulthanash.’ Talos broke the silence of the cold room, looking back at the weeping goddess.

  ‘Craftworld Ulthwé.’

  ‘Look out at my father’s Imperium.

  Do not unroll a parchment map or analyse a hololithic starchart.

  Merely raise your head to the night sky and open your eyes.

  Stare into the blackness between worlds – that dark ocean, the silent sea.

  Stare into the million eyes of firelight – each a sun to be subjugated in the Emperor’s grip.

  The age of the alien, the era of the inhuman, is over.

  Mankind is in its ascendancy, and with ten thousand claws we will lay claim to the stars themselves.'

  – Primarch Konrad Curze

  recorded by an unknown VIII Legion sorcerer, M32

  I

  It knew itself only as the Eldest.

  More than its name, this was its place in creation. It was the oldest, the strongest, the fiercest, and it had tasted the most blood. Before it had become the Eldest, it had been one of the lesser breed. These weakling creatures were the Eldest’s kin, though it remained distant from them now, seeking to quieten a hunger that would never fade.

  The Eldest twitched in its repose, not quite asleep, not quite in hibernation, but a state of stillness that haunted between the two. Its thoughts were sluggish, a slow crawl of instinct and vague sensation behind its closed eyes. The consciousnesses of its kin whispered in the back of the Eldest’s mind.

  They spoke of weakness, of a lack of prey, and that made such whispers ignorable.

  Nor was the Eldest a creature capable of dreaming. Instead of sleeping, instead of dreaming as a human would, it remained motionless in the deepest dark, ignoring the thought-pulses of its weakling kin and allowing its somnolent thoughts to linger on the hateful hunger that pained it to its core.

  Prey, its sluggish mind ached, burning with need.

  Blood. Flesh. Hunger.

  II

  The demigods moved through the darkness, and Septimus followed.

  He was still unsure why the master had demanded he accompany them, but his duty was to obey
, not to question. He’d buckled himself into his ragged atmosphere suit – a poor comparison to the demigods’ all-enclosing Astartes war plate – and he’d followed them down the gunship’s ramp, into the blackness beyond.

  ‘Why are you going with them?’ a female voice had crackled over his suit’s vox. To reply, Septimus had needed to switch channels manually, tuning a frequency dial built into the small suit control vambrace on his left arm. By the time he’d patched into the right channel, the female voice had repeated the question in a tone both more worried and more irritated.

  ‘I said, why are you going with them?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the servant replied. He was already falling behind the Astartes, and was practically jogging to keep pace. For all the use it was, the luminator mounted on the side of his helm cast its weak lance of light wherever he looked. A beam of dull amber light speared ahead, cutting the darkness with illumination so thin and dim it was almost worthless.

  The spotlight brushed over arched walls of unpolished metal, gantry floor decking and – after only a few minutes – the first body.

  The master and his brothers had already passed, but Septimus slowed in his stride, kneeling by the corpse.

  ‘Keep up, slave,’ one of them voxed back to him as they descended deeper into the dark tunnels. ‘Ignore the bodies.’

  Septimus allowed himself a last look at the body – human, male, frozen stiff in the heatless dark. He could have been dead a week, or a hundred years. All sense of decay was halted with the vessel powered down and open to the void.

  A rime of frost coated everything with a crystalline second skin, from the walls to the decking to the dead man’s tortured face.

  ‘Keep up, slave,’ the voice called back again, snarling and low.

  Septimus raised his gaze, and the weak beam trailed out into the darkness. He couldn’t see the master, or the master’s brothers. They’d moved too far ahead. What met his questing stare instead was altogether more gruesome, yet not entirely unexpected.