Night Lords Omnibus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Cyrion was the only one of First Claw to witness the duel that followed. What he saw stayed with him until the night he died.

  They didn’t engage at once. Xarl and Tolemion stared at each other for several moments, each taking in the trophies and honour markings displayed across their rival’s suit of armour. Tolemion was a vision in Imperial accoutrement, with wax purity seals, honour scrolls and aquilas decorating his ornate war plate. Xarl stood in filthy reflection, his armour adorned with skulls and Imperial Space Marine helms hanging from rusted chains, with swatches of flayed skin in place of parchment scrolls.

  ‘I am Tolemion of the Genesis, Warden of the West Protectorate. I am the End of Heretics, the Bane of Traitors, and a loyal son of Lord Guilliman.’

  ‘Oh,’ Xarl chuckled through his voxsponder. ‘You must be very proud.’ He tossed something round and heavy onto the decking between them both. It rolled to knock gently against Tolemion’s boot. A helm. A Genesis Space Marine’s helm – the eye lenses put out, the faceplate smeared with blood.

  ‘You’ll scream just as he did,’ Xarl said with a smile.

  The Champion showed no reaction. He didn’t even move. ‘I knew that warrior,’ he said with solemn care. ‘He was Caleus, born of Newfound, and I know he died as he lived: with courage, honour, and knowing no fear.’

  Xarl swept his chainsword across the scene, gesturing at the prone forms of First Claw. ‘I know all of these warriors. They are First Claw, and I know they’ll die as they lived: trying to run away.’

  It was the laughter that did it. His mockery of the Genesis Champion’s demeanour wasn’t quite enough to incite the Imperial wretch to rage, but Xarl’s laughter served as the coffin’s final nail.

  Tolemion advanced, shield high and hammer at the ready. ‘Make peace with your black-hearted gods, heretic. Tonight, you will know the–’

  Xarl gave a distinctly annoyed snort. ‘I’d forgotten how much you heroes liked the sound of your own voices.’ As Tolemion drew nearer, the Night Lord gripped his two-handed chainblade in a single gauntlet. In his other hand, Xarl caught the handle of Uzas’s damaged chainaxe, as he kicked it up from the deck.

  Both blades began to roar as their teeth chewed the air. He’d fought through seven Imperial Space Marines to get back here, and their blood flicked in a light spray from the whirring teeth of his chainsword. Beneath his armour, sweat bathed his skin in a greasy sheen, while amusement danced with the strain of pain and anger in his eyes. The sting of already suffered wounds knifed at him through the rents in his war plate.

  ‘Let’s get this done,’ he said, still smiling. ‘I look forward to letting our slaves use your helm as a shitbucket.’

  Deltrian didn’t need to breathe – that is, to respire in the conventional sense – but his remaining internal organics required an oxygenated system to function, and could only be slowed by necessity for so long. The augmetic equivalent of holding one’s breath was to manipulate his inner chronometry, forcing it to operate at a fraction of optimal speed. It left him slower, near sluggish, but it meant he could operate in the void for up to three hours, by his closest prediction.

  His robes drifted around him as he walked. Beneath his clawed feet, the ridged hull of the Echo of Damnation stretched out for kilometres both ahead and behind. To look in any other direction was to stare out into the far reaches of space, and the stars winking an infinity’s distance away. The enemy vessel circled the Echo of Damnation with rapacious patience, casting shadows across the larger cruiser’s hull as it eclipsed the distant sun. The ship was a battlemented void-cutter, a strike cruiser with the inscription Diadem Mantle along its prow. Almost against his will, he considered it a singularly beautiful name for a warship.

  Deltrian took another step, making his cautious way across the outer hull, leading a phalanx of those in his service. Most wore environment suits and full rebreathers. Several were robed, as resistant to the void as Deltrian himself. The pack traversed brutalised sections of the ship’s armoured skin, moving through craterous holes and across wrenched-steel terrain. A warship would endure an eternity of external damage with no concern, but a handful of unfortunate shots against certain sections, and havoc was the result.

  ‘Your Reverence, please,’ one of Deltrian’s lesser adepts began over the vox. Lacking the human lexicon to continue in a formal complaint, the robed priest blurted a pulse of offended code over their communications link. Deltrian turned to face the other adept, his skullish face peering from beneath his red cowl with glittering eye lenses. While Deltrian’s appearance was a calculated artifice to inspire discomfort in biologicals, his Mechanicum kindred could read the displeasure in the subtle kinetics of his facial movements, even down to the shutter-guarded glare of his focusing lenses.

  The adept was already preparing to apologise when Deltrian spoke.

  ‘Lacuna Absolutus, if you distract me with further objection, I will have you rendered down to your component pieces. Pulse me acknowledgement signifying your comprehension.’

  Lacuna Absolutus transmitted a spurt of affirmative code.

  ‘Good.’ Deltrian returned his focus to his duty. ‘Now is not the time to cite optimal operational specifics.’

  It took the Mechanicum repair party exactly twelve minutes and two seconds to reach the first shield generation spire. The damage was immediately apparent: the pylon, reaching out six times as high as an unaugmented man, was a mangled tower of scrap iron in a crater of damage eaten into the metal meat of the hull.

  ‘Analysing,’ he said, devoting his sphere of attention to the damage he beheld. What required immediate maintenance? What was superficial hull-scoring, and could wait until dry dock?

  ‘Sixteen composite metal girders to replace the focusing spire’s damage.’ Four servitors shambled to obey, their mag-locked boots sending minute tremors along the hull. Deltrian’s eye lenses whirred as he sought to perceive through the outermost layers of the hull. He pressed his hand to the twisted metal, pulsing ultrasound into the damaged floor. ‘The damage does not extend to any significant depth. Internal team, move ahead.’

  ‘Compliance,’ came the dead-voiced reply, from over a dozen metres beneath his feet.

  ‘Your Reverence?’ one of his adepts voxed.

  Deltrian didn’t turn. He was already walking into the crater, beginning the hike to the next spire.

  ‘Vocalise, Lacuna Absolutus.’

  ‘Have you determined the probability of the enemy craft detecting the attempted repairs on their narrow-band auspex sweeps?’

  ‘Detecting us is irrelevant. The void shields are active. We are working to ensure they remain active. I had not realised the situation was beyond your cognition.’

  ‘Your Reverence, the void shields are active now. If they fall again before we complete the repairs, the enemy will surely seek to interfere with our actions, will they not?’

  Deltrian resisted the urge to emit an expletive. ‘Be silent, Lacuna Absolutus.’

  ‘Compliance, your Reverence.’

  Xarl caught another hammer blow in the crossed blades. His own sword – the unimaginatively-named Executioner – was already reduced to ruin. In flashes of insight between blocking blows and swinging to kill, he sincerely doubted Septimus would be able to restore it to full working order.

  If Septimus was even still alive. The ship was taking a hell of a beating, and the crew with it.

  He’d miss this sword, no doubt there. Assuming he survived, of course. He trusted his skills in battle above any of First Claw (above any Night Lord except Malek of the Atramentar, if he was being perfectly honest), but duelling an Adeptus Astartes Company Champion was no laughing matter, especially not one this well armed and armoured.

  Xarl knocked the thunder hammer aside with Uzas’s damaged axe, lashing another fruitless strike against Tolemion’s dense armour with his own blade. The chainsword, now almost toothless, skidded along the layered ceramite, leaving nothing but scratches. With so few teeth, it had almost no g
rip. No chain weapon could stand up to a protracted duel with a thunder hammer. Xarl cast it aside with a curse.

  Three crashing strikes against Tolemion’s shield drove the warrior back as far as Xarl needed. He repeated his kicking move, flipping Talos’s stolen Blood Angel power sword off the deck and catching it in his spare hand. Clenching the grip was enough to activate it. The sword hissed and spat with lethal lightning dancing along its golden length, crackling as the energy discharged into the air.

  Everything changed the moment he held the blade, for he had a weapon that could reliably parry the devastating maul. Xarl used both weapons to smash into the hammer’s haft, knocking its descent aside. Conflicting power fields met with angry, snarling sparks. When Tolemion’s shield came high, readying for a crushing bash, Xarl’s axe hacked into the top rim. The Night Lord pulled the hooked axe, tearing the shield from the Space Marine’s grip.

  They backed away once more. Xarl kept both weapons live, one boot on the half-aquila of the fallen boarding shield. Tolemion gripped his hammer in both hands.

  ‘You have done well, traitor, but this ends now.’

  ‘I think I’m winning.’ the Night Lord grinned behind his faceplate. ‘What do you think?’

  Deltrian reached the third damaged generator pylon. This one, half a kilometre from the first, was a ruined stump of melted metal. Its severed nub scarcely poked from the ship’s scorched armour-skin. The hull underfoot was a pitted, dissolved desert of abused steel, having suffered heavy damage in the last cannonade.

  For the first time in several decades, Deltrian felt something akin to hopelessness. The emotion was simply too powerful, too sudden, to swallow back down in traditional Mechanicum repression of the mortal, the flawed, the organic.

  ‘Lacuna Absolutus.’

  ‘Your Reverence?’

  ‘Take the last team ahead to the final damaged spire. I will deal with this one myself.’

  Lacuna Absolutus stood next to his master, his own red hood drifting in the airless void. His face was a chrome-plated simulacrum of an ancient Terran death mask, expressionless, yet not without judgement. His voice issued forth from a coin-sized vocaliser tablet sutured into his throat.

  ‘Understood. But how will you deal with this, your Reverence?’

  Deltrian grinned, because he always grinned. His features left him no choice in the matter. ‘You have your orders. Begone.’

  A shiver wormed its way down his spine as he received information from his link to the ship.

  ‘No,’ he said aloud.

  ‘Your Reverence?’

  ‘No, no, no. The generator was stabilised.’

  ‘Void shields,’ came the voice across his uplink bond, ‘failing.’

  VIII

  TURNING THE TIDE

  Xarl heaved with the blade, each of his grunted breaths rasping blood flecks into the inside of his helm. The duel had lasted no longer than a handful of minutes, during which both warriors had melted into blurs of movement, each landing blows and smashing others aside with feverish desperation. All elegance had fled, coming down now to two warriors wishing nothing more than to kill the other.

  It grieved him to realise it, but Xarl was already exhausted. Being hit with a tank-cracking thunder hammer was little different from being hit by a tank itself. His left arm was slack and useless, the pauldron broken along with the shoulder beneath it. Each breath was effort, rendered into needling torment from the way his destroyed breastplate had pierced his chest in several places.

  ‘Just die,’ he breathed, and heaved with the blade yet again. This time it came clear, ripping free of Tolemion’s stomach with a spray of cleaved armour shards moistened by gore.

  The Champion sagged, his armour reduced to similar wreckage, the cast-iron hammer now dragging against the decking.

  ‘Heretic,’ the Space Marine snarled. ‘For your… impurity…’

  Xarl’s backhand ended the threatened chastisement, snapping the loyalist’s helm to the side. ‘I know, I know… You already said all that.’

  The Night Lord staggered back himself, dropping the sword so his one good hand could claw at his collar locks. He had to disengage his helm’s seals. He had to get the helmet off so he could see, and so he could breathe.

  It came free with the snap-hiss of depressurising air. As soon as his eyes were clear of the blood-smeared lenses, Xarl raised Talos’s blade again. The ship was shaking around them.

  ‘Your shields are down.’ Tolemion barked a harsh laugh. ‘More of my brothers will be boarding.’

  Xarl didn’t reply. He charged forward with all the strength he could muster, muscles fuelled as much by anger as the adrenal sting of combat narcotics. Sword met hammer again and again, crashing and flashing as their opposing power fields protested each impact. Their blows were blurs as the wounded warriors spat and cursed, bleeding the last of their energy into the duel’s final moments.

  Tolemion gave no ground. Retreat was simply not within him. Xarl’s blade cracked against his armour-plating, cutting cold and deep, each carve leeching precious portions of what little strength he had left. In return, his hammer was a slow, clumsy maul that rarely struck his opponent – but when it did, it echoed with vicious finality, throwing the Night Lord back against the wall.

  Xarl jumped to his feet again, feeling split sections of his outer armour falling free. He shuddered to think how long these repairs were going to take First Claw’s artificer, and stumbled, almost falling again as he stepped over Cyrion’s body. The other Night Lord was trying to rise himself, to no avail.

  ‘Xarl,’ Cyrion growled through his helm. ‘Help me up.’

  ‘Stay down,’ Xarl was panting. A single glance at his brother’s prone form told him all he needed to know: Cyrion was too weak to do anything, anyway. ‘I will be done in a moment,’ he said.

  Hammer and blade fell in the same moment, meeting midway between the bloody, swearing warriors. The flash was enough to leave a retinal bruise playing over Xarl’s eyes, while his vision danced with flickering after-images.

  He wasn’t going to win this if it stayed a fair fight, and his options to cheat were getting thinner with each drop of blood that ran from his body. The bastard’s armour was too thick, and one more hammerfall would keep him down long enough for Tolemion to finish the job.

  The Genesis Space Marine drew breath for another chastisement. Xarl chose that moment to head-butt him.

  A life of bloodshed and battle meant Xarl was no stranger to pain, but pounding his bare forehead against the riveted, dense helm of an Adeptus Astartes Company Champion immediately ranked as one of the most agonising moments of his existence. Tolemion’s head snapped back, but Xarl wouldn’t let him go. He leaned closer, around their waspishly buzzing weapons, and powered his head against the Space Marine’s faceplate a second time. Then a third. The impacts made the corridor echo like a forge, and his nose gave way with a sickening snap on the fourth. On the fifth, something cracked in the front of his skull. Two more followed it. He was breaking his own face apart, and the feeling was both distantly indescribable, and painful beyond words.

  Blood sheeted into his eyes. He could no longer see, but he could feel Tolemion’s muscles loosening, and hear the gargling of a throat injury. He spat, then. A stringy gobbet of blood-diluted acidic saliva splashed against Tolemion’s left eye lens, eating its hissing way into the flesh beneath.

  An eighth head-butt was enough to send both of them reeling: Tolemion stumbling back against the wall, Xarl losing his balance and collapsing to his knees for several heartbeats. Talos’s sword fell from his grip. Blinded, he felt along the floor for the fallen weapon.

  He sensed the shadow rising above him, and heard the tense growl of wounded power armour. He knew the Genesis Space Marine was raising the hammer high, its distinctive thrum was unmistakable. Xarl’s fingers closed around the hilt of Talos’s energised sword. With a scream of effort, he rammed it upwards.

  It bit, and bit deep. Xarl didn’t hesitate �
� he started carving as soon as it sank in. His clumsy, brutal hacksawing tore through armour, flesh and bone with equal relish. Gore rained onto him, populated wormishly by the looping ropes of Tolemion’s intestines. He felt them splash over his shoulders and circle his neck like oil-slick snakes. At any other time, he’d have been amused at the foul display.

  Xarl yanked the sword free, hauling himself to his feet in a surge of renewed vitality. His next chop cleaved the champion’s hammer-hand at the wrist, letting the weapon fall at last.

  ‘I am taking your helm,’ Xarl panted, ‘as a trophy. I think I earned it.’

  Tolemion swayed on his feet, too strong and too stubborn to collapse. ‘For… For the… Emp–’

  Xarl took a step back, spun with all the strength he could muster, and powered the golden blade through his enemy’s neck. It went through without slowing, as though it had nothing to chop but clean air. The head fell one way, the body another.

  ‘To the abyss with your Emperor,’ Xarl sighed.

  Deltrian had never worked faster, even with the relative limitations opposed by his slowed internal chronometry. He’d deployed his four auxiliary arms, activating them and letting them uncurl from their sockets in his resculpted back. These replicas of his skeletal main arms each gripped a blocky signum device, shaped as wire-encrusted rods. The adept couldn’t trust his servitors to work with the speed and precision the moment required, and thus it fell to Deltrian to slave them to his more efficient output.

  The four servitors responded in service to the merest movement of the signum controls in his hands, their every tic and breath controlled by his will. In a morbid ballet of lobotomised unity, the bionic slaves lifted girders into place, sealed them with fusing strips, and worked to rebuild the destroyed power pylon’s external focusing spire.

  Linking the spire’s foundations to the flash-fried electronics being replaced in the hull itself was a much more difficult task. To that end, Deltrian multisected his visual receptors, seeing with a fly’s segmented vision through the eyes of the four servitors outside on the hull with him; through his own perspective as overseer at the crater’s edge; and through the eyes of two of the servitors on board the ship, several metres below his feet. They were cramped into the crawlspace tunnels, their corpse-like flesh leaking its oily sweat as they laboured with fingertip micro-tools, re-bonding and rewiring the damage done.