Night Lords Omnibus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Her face was shielded by a silver death mask, sculpted in the cold-eyed image of a screaming goddess. A high, long crest of black hair flowed down her shoulders and back, somehow immune to the wind sending dust-wraiths haunting through the ruins.

  Everything about her radiated wrongness, even to a creature as warp-touched as he. For several seconds, the heat haze remained around her, as if she were at risk of being rejected by reality.

  This is no eldar maiden, the Raptor knew. Perhaps she was, once. Now… she is something much more.

  Lucoryphus’s claws tightened on the stone as the eldar war-goddess flew across the ground in a blurred sprint, her feet barely gracing the earth. One moment she was a silver blur in the ruins; the next she was gone, either vanished into thin air or descended underground – Lucoryphus wasn’t certain.

  ‘Talos.’ He opened the vox-link again. ‘I have seen what hunts us.’

  Second Claw had survived for over three hours in a series of running gunfights, repelling wave after wave of alien attackers. The only lights to flash down the tunnels and illuminate the chambers came from the staccato flicker of weapons fire, or the rare clash of opposing energy fields when a power sword met another of its kind.

  Yuris was limping from the blade wound to his thigh. He knew his brothers would leave him behind soon. It wasn’t a matter of needing to talk them into abandoning him, nor did it come down to something as noble as self-sacrifice. They’d leave him behind because he was getting slower, and getting weaker. His life had become a liability to theirs.

  The Night Lord caught his breath with his back to a wall. He locked his bolter to his thigh for a moment, reloading it with a crunching smack, and only a single hand.

  ‘My last,’ he voxed to the other two survivors. ‘I’m out of ammunition.’

  ‘We’ll fall back to the reserve crates,’ replied Fal Torm. The truth was implicit in the other warrior’s words: they would fall back to the ammunition reserves, but they’d almost certainly leave him behind. If Yuris’s death bought them a few more seconds, then all the better.

  ‘You’re hurt worse than you’re admitting,’ said Xan Kurus. The backswept wings on Xan Kurus’s helm had been shattered off hours before, broken away by an alien blade. ‘I can smell your lifeblood, and hear the strain in your hearts.’

  Yuris couldn’t catch his breath. It was difficult to inhale, forcing air into a throat that felt too tight.

  Is this what dying feels like?

  ‘I’m still standing,’ he voxed back. ‘Come. Let’s move.’

  The three survivors of Second Claw retreated further into the dark, breaking into a ragged run. Mere hours before, Yuris had led nine other souls. Now he was the high and mighty lord over two warriors, both of whom were preparing to abandon him the moment the opportunity presented itself.

  As with humans, all eldar were not created equal. Yuris had learned that at great cost. The ones with weak projectile rifles and thin armour of black plate and mesh weave – they died like weak children and shot with all the skill expected of any hive-born member drawn from humanity’s urban dregs. But the others… The shrieking witches and the sword-killers…

  Six warriors dead in three hours. The alien maidens would dissolve out of the dark, weaving past any gunfire, and lock blades with the Night Lords in a storm of blows. Whether they killed or not didn’t seem to change their behaviour; as soon as the first blade clashes were done, they’d break away and flee back through the tunnels.

  The howling was the worst part of every charge – they’d scream a dirge long and loud enough to wake the forgotten dead of this accursed world. Each howl knifed a sliver of ice right into the back of his head, doing something to his brain, slowing his reactions enough to leave him straining to parry every blow.

  Ah, but Second Claw hadn’t gone down easy. They were the hunters, after all. Yuris had slit three of the maidens’ pale throats himself, grappling them from behind and ending them with a quick, sawing caress of his gladius.

  Back and forth it went: charge, defend, hunt, slice, retreat…

  Yuris stumbled in his run, his hand resting on the wall for balance. He’d run ahead of his brothers, but that soon became limping alongside them, and at last, limping and lagging behind.

  ‘Goodbye, Yuris,’ Xan Kurus voxed from up ahead. Fal Torm didn’t even stop – he carried on at a dead sprint.

  ‘Wait,’ Yuris said to Xan Kurus. ‘Wait, brother.’

  ‘Why?’ Xan Kurus was already running again. ‘Die well.’

  Yuris listened to his kindred’s bootsteps growing fainter. His stumbling run devolved into a simple stagger, and he crashed against the wall, sliding down to his knees.

  I don’t want to die on Tsagualsa. The thought rose, sourceless and unbidden. Was Tsagualsa truly a worse place to die than any other?

  Yes, he thought. The carrion world is cursed. We should never have returned here.

  The ancient superstition brought a painful smile to his bloody lips. And what did it matter? He’d served, hadn’t he? He’d served loyally down the centuries, and ripped pleasure from a galaxy that had never been able to deny him. Until now…

  Yuris tried to grin again, but blood spilled from his mangled lips in a black gush.

  No matter. No matter. It was a fine thing, to be alive and to be strong.

  His helm tipped forward as that strength finally faded, seeping out with his blood.

  ‘Yuris,’ the vox crackled.

  Begone, Fal Torm. Run ahead, if you wish. Let me die alone and in peace, bastards.

  ‘Yuris,’ the voice repeated.

  He opened his eyes without realising they’d been closed. Red-tinted vision returned, showing his cracked breastplate and the stump where his left hand had been less than an hour before.

  What? he asked, and had to make a second attempt to speak it out loud. ‘What?’ he voxed.

  His retinal display feeds were white blurs of scrolling gibberish. Blinking twice brought them back into resolution.

  Xan Kurus’s life signals registered as a flatline. As did Fal Torm’s.

  That cannot be. Yuris forced himself to his feet, biting back a groan at the agony of his broken knee and missing hand. His armour’s damage prevented it from flooding pain inhibitors into his bloodstream, only compounding his torment.

  He found his last two brothers in the hallways ahead, and shook with suppressed laughter. Both bodies were sprawled across the stone floor, their ruination exacting and complete. Xan Kurus and Fal Torm were both cleaved in half at the waist, their bodies separated from their legs. Blood decorated the floor in patternless blotching.

  Neither of them had a head. Their helms were free of their severed necks, released to roll against the wall once the corpses fell.

  Yuris couldn’t bite back the laughter. Despite abandoning him, they’d died before him, anyway. Even through the pain, the notion appealed to his sense of poetic justice.

  The blade that killed Yuris struck first in the back, driving through his lower spine and bursting from the layered armour over his belly. Foul, glistening ropes of offal followed it out, as his insides tumbled in a sick heap at his boots.

  Yuris managed to remain standing for another couple of heartbeats before the blade struck again. He saw it this time; a blur of spinning silver and burning black, slashing through the air quicker than a blink. It cleaved into his ripped stomach and tore out from his lower back, and this time Yuris fell to the ground with a cry and a crash.

  For one grotesque moment, he found himself on his back, reaching with his one remaining hand to drag himself back over to his legs.

  Then she was above him. The creature Lucoryphus had warned them about. His racing, firing, dying mind screamed at him to act. He had to vox the others. He had to warn them she was already down here.

  But that didn’t happen. He said nothing. He warned no one. Yuris opened his mouth, only to choke a hot flood of bile and blood down his neck.

  The silent witch-queen lifte
d the spear cradled in her other hand, and lifted it high above. She said a single word in crude Gothic, her accent spicing it almost beyond recognition.

  ‘Sleep.’

  For Yuris, blessed blackness dawned at last, with the fall of an alien blade.

  The first howls had caught him unprepared. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  When First Claw linked up with Faroven’s Third Claw, both squads readied to hold an expansive network of chambers for as long as they could, replete with annex rooms, fall back tunnels and defensible junctions.

  ‘Have you seen Malcharion?’ was Faroven’s first question.

  ‘He still hunts alone,’ Talos had replied.

  The screaming maidens came in the wake of those words. After fighting the weakling warriors of the last few hours, the shrieking assault had been an unpleasant change in pace and tactics. Still, it had at least stopped Cyrion from pining to use the assault cannon.

  The first howls had caught them unprepared. Before the blade-witches attacked, they shrieked their mournful cries, using the song itself as a weapon. Immunity to fear meant nothing in that song’s shadow – Talos felt his blood run cold, felt his muscles slowing, felt sweat break out at his temples, as his body reacted the way any terrified mortal’s flesh might.

  The sensation had been… incredible, almost intoxicating in its unnatural force. Like nothing he’d ever felt in all the long decades of his life. No soul enhanced by gene-seed could feel terror, yet even though the creeping doubt never touched his mind, the physical sensation of feeling fear still forced a laugh from his throat. To think this was a pale reflection of what he inflicted on those he killed? To sense it first-hand?

  How educational, he’d thought, grinning his crooked grin. The amusement was admittedly dampened by the deadness in his limbs, and short-lived enough to burn away in his anger a moment later.

  But the aliens were among them by then. They cut and cleaved and carved with their mirrored blades, savaging the ranks of the last two Night Lord claws left standing. They danced as they killed, as though performing some inhuman dance to music only they could hear. Each of their helms was sculpted into a shouting death mask, open mouths projecting the psychically amplified shriek.

  A lovely trick, he thought, hating himself for admiring anything an alien breed could create.

  As the prophet deflected a descending sword with the back of his armoured glove, he fancied – in his fever – he could sense the song’s edges himself. The crash of blades on ceramite was the rapid clash of soft drums; the grunts and cries of his dying brothers became the rhythm beneath it.

  ‘Be silent,’ he snarled, backhanding the alien wretch with his power fist. Her shrieking ended along with her life: with a wet crack against the stone wall behind.

  The eldar were gone as quickly as they’d come, fleeing back into the tunnels.

  ‘They’re not howling now,’ Cyrion had laughed.

  Talos hadn’t laughed. Three of Third Claw lay dead, cut to pieces by the banshees’ blades. Only one of the eldar had fallen; the one he’d smashed aside with his fist.

  Talos walked his careful, crunching way across the chamber. As he drew near, he saw her fingers twitch.

  ‘She still lives,’ Faroven warned.

  ‘So I see.’

  Talos pressed his boot down on her hand, the gears grinding in his knees. It took no effort at all – the Terminator suit made it no harder than drawing breath – to crush her hand into a bloody smear of paste.

  That woke her up, and she woke up screaming. He dragged the helm from her head, and the psychic cry died, leaving an almost-human moan in its place.

  Talos rested the assault cannon on her chest.

  ‘I know you,’ she said in awkward Gothic, as though the words tasted foul. Her slanted eyes narrowed, showing the lush green of long-lost forests. ‘I am Taisha, Daughter of Morai-Heg, and I know you, Soul Hunter.’

  ‘Whatever your alien witchery has told you,’ his voice was a vox-altered snarl, ‘is meaningless. For you lie at death’s edge, and I am the one to kick you over it.’

  Trapped with her arm ruined beneath his boot, she still managed to smile through agony’s breathless panting.

  ‘You will cross blades with the Void Stalker,’ she grinned with bloody gums. ‘And you will die on this world.’

  ‘And who is the Void Stalker?’

  Her answer was to lash out with a kick. He’d tortured eldar countless times before – they never broke under excruciation, and never whispered a word they didn’t wish to speak.

  Talos lifted his boot and walked away.

  ‘End her,’ he voxed, not caring who did the deed.

  Lucoryphus wasn’t ashamed of the feast. Just as the Eighth Legion scavenged wargear from the slain, so too did the Bleeding Eyes scavenge flesh.

  He knew if Talos or any of the others saw him pulling apart his brothers’ bodies to devour the meat within, they’d be unlikely to see it in such generous terms, but with events unfolding as they were, that hardly seemed to matter.

  And it wasn’t as if Vorasha and the others needed their flesh anymore. Lucoryphus was careful, between mouthfuls, to save their gene-seed. No ceremonial extraction for a fallen Raptor, and no emotional butchery at a brother’s hands. Lucoryphus pulled the fleshy nodes out with handfuls of meat around them, and stored them in a cryo-canister at his thigh.

  Then went right back to devouring the dead in the rain.

  He looked up every now and again, his bare face tingling in the unfamiliar feel of wind as he scanned for signs of eldar arrival. What scraps of chatter he caught from the vox sounded as though the subterranean hunts were no longer of interest. They were all as good as dead.

  He wasn’t even sure why he was taking the Bleeding Eyes’ gene-seed. Some traditions were tenacious, even in the face of death.

  When he heard the gunship’s engine, his instinctive reaction was to tense, claws activating as he turned to face the growing sound. Without his helm’s vision cycles, his sight suffered at a distance. He needed movement to follow, motion to track, else he was close to blind past a hundred paces.

  Lucoryphus was reaching for his helm when the gunship reached him, hovering overhead, breathing engine wash downward and blasting dust across the ruins. He watched without expression as the gangramp opened, and felt no pulse of surprise at the figure that dropped from the sky.

  The Night Lord landed with a smooth thud, and voxed back up to the gunship. ‘I am down. Land on the battlements over there. Stay away from any eldar ground forces. If you are engaged from the air, run. That is all I desire from you. Understood.’

  The gunship banked without the pilot replying, thrusters flaring as it obeyed.

  ‘Lucoryphus of the Bleeding Eyes,’ said Variel.

  ‘Variel the Flayer.’

  ‘I have never seen you with your helmet off.’

  Lucoryphus replaced his helm, fixing the daemon’s visage back over his face.

  ‘You look like a drowned corpse,’ Variel noted.

  ‘I know what I look like. Why are you here?’

  Variel let his gaze drift around the ruins. ‘A fool’s hope. Where is Talos?’

  Lucoryphus gestured with his claw, the blades angled down. ‘Beneath.’

  ‘I cannot reach him on the vox.’

  ‘Contact breaks down. They’re deep under, and fighting.’

  ‘Where is the closest entrance to the catacombs?’

  Lucoryphus gestured again. The Apothecary started walking, his own dense bionic leg making a thunk, thunk, thunk on the dusty soil. Pistons hissed in his cybernetic knee.

  Lucoryphus followed, dropping to all fours in a graceful prowl that never failed to impress Variel for its unexpected elegance.

  ‘How did you get past the blockade?’ the Raptor asked.

  ‘There is no blockade. Two-dozen vessels wait in high orbit, with little sign of landing craft. We didn’t even detect a sensor sweep. It took hours to reach this far, but twenty v
essels cannot keep an entire world in their eyes. You may as well ask a blind man to count each rock that makes up a mountain.’

  Lucoryphus said nothing as they passed Vorasha’s mutilated, half-eaten body. Variel wasn’t so silent.

  ‘In a time now considered myth, cannibalism was considered good for the body and soul.’ He looked at the Raptor for a moment. ‘If we survive this, I would like a sample of your blood.’

  ‘Not a prayer.’

  Variel nodded, expecting that answer. ‘You are aware, Lucoryphus, that such degrees of livor mortis and bacterial decomposition on your face and throat would simply not manifest on a living being? Your biology is in a stage of autolysis. Your cells are eating themselves. Does the feasting on fraternal flesh regenerate the process?’

  Lucoryphus didn’t reply. Variel continued nevertheless. ‘How then do you live? Are you dead, yet still alive? Or has the warp played a greater game with you?’

  ‘I no longer know what I am. I haven’t known for centuries. Now tell me why you’re here.’

  Above the forgotten fortress, the storm finally showed its strength. Lightning lit up the grey sky, while heavier rain lashed down on their armour. Variel’s flayed shoulder guard, the skinned face of a brother he’d slain long ago, seemed to be weeping.

  ‘Talos.’

  He didn’t reply. Teeth clenched, he kept the cannon’s trigger pulled tight, streaming out tracer fire to illuminate the dark tunnel. The numeric runes on his retinal display depleted away, shrinking by the second, even as the cannon’s spinning barrels began to glow a brighter red with the pressure of overheating.

  ‘Talos,’ the voice crackled again. ‘Don’t move too far ahead.’

  The assault cannon eased off with a descending whine. He bit back a harsh reply, knowing it would make no difference. Cyrion was right; still, the frustration remained. The hunt had changed once more. When the eldar stopped coming to them, they’d taken the fight to the eldar.

  Talos stalked to a stop, letting the stabilisers and servos in his leg armour settle once more. The cannon hissed in the cold air, while dead aliens lay strewn at his feet.

  Cyrion and Mercutian stomped closer, filling the tunnel with their whirring joints and pounding footsteps. Both of their storm bolters showed defiled Imperial aquilas. Both weapons also had smoking barrels.