by Guy Haley
He shivered sensuously, and drew black fingernails over his luminous flesh.
‘We followed similar paths. We should have had so much in common, and yet Corax always hated me. He thought I was barbaric, cruel. Him! The noble freedom fighter who incinerated untold thousands in atomic fire to secure his great moral victory. He understood the value of atrocity well enough, even if he pretended not to.’
Curze shook his head and laughed. ‘You see, that’s what I don’t understand. Why did you breed such a clutch of hypocrites?’
He wrapped long, bony arms around his knees, and pressed his face into them.
‘I’ll tell you something else,’ said Curze. ‘I hated him too. You might think I hated all my brothers. I didn’t. They were the ones that hated me. I could not hate them back. Most of them I could tolerate, a few I respected. A couple I loved, though they never returned the affection. But I hated Corax.’ He looked aside in shame and spoke to the wall. ‘I hated him so much.
‘I didn’t hate him for being like me, nor for being better, though if he and I were two aspects of the same principle, he was the better one. Everything about us was so similar, to your design,’ Curze said significantly. ‘Was he not born into awful straits? Was he not victimised? Oppressed? But he did not murder like I did. He used passion and argument where I used blood. I hated myself for not being like him, but I couldn’t despise someone for being what I was not. Why would I hate him for any of those things?’ He looked back at the statue and cleared his throat theatrically. ‘Was it that he failed like I did to fully tame his world, meekly handing it over to the Mechanicum? Did I hate him because he was weak?’ He pressed his face hard into his updrawn knee. ‘I couldn’t hate him for that either.’
He sneered, gnawing at his skin until blood ran.
‘I’ll tell you why. Envy of his mastery lay behind my hatred. I haunted the night, but Corax owned it.’ Breath hissed through dagger teeth. ‘He owned it. My stupid, short-sighted sons thought the Ravens’ abilities came from technology given only to the Nineteenth. I saw it was innate. Imagine what I could have done had you given the same gifts to me? How much more perfect a monster I would have been had the shadows loved me as much as they loved Corax!’
Choking clouds of flesh smoke rolled from every opening in the street, restricting vision to a handful of metres and hiding lumps of rockcrete that leapt out on helm-plate displays only when they were ready to snare the squad’s feet.
Sevatar’s visual feed was a mess of white, half-guessed outlines and uncertain target locks. He tuned his suit’s autosenses up and down the spectrum, but every range was compromised. Rolling waves of electromagnetism let out by energy weapon strikes disrupted the highest frequencies, rendering radar and other devices reliant on regular wave patterning useless. In the lower ranges, all forms of visible and near-visible light were swallowed up by the oily smoke. Preysight was especially useless. When activated, blazing buildings turned the world into shifting columns of colour impossible to navigate. Only pulsed sound waves offered a way through, and they could not be trusted. The density of the environment and the thundering orbital bombardment sent false echoes back.
Sevatar’s foot rang off a boulder of rockcrete fragments with a shuddering bang. He stumbled, kicking his way through a tangle of twisted rebar wrapped through the false stone. Fragments of the ’crete bounced across the road. He slowed, scanning billows of smoke and the swift glimpses of buildings he snatched from the murk.
Camen Manek didn’t see Sevatar slow, and slammed hard into his powerpack, sending them both reeling.
Sevatar recovered first, grabbing hold of Manek’s pauldron. Armour servos grunted as he twisted the trooper’s shoulder, forcing the other into an ungainly lean.
‘Watch yourself,’ Sevatar said quietly, helm to helm, and shoved the Apothecary back.
‘I was born in the darkest pit of the sunless world, but it’s impossible to see anything in this!’ Manek growled. His eye lenses were red sparks in the rolling black smoke.
A triple shell burst-shocked the air. Whistling and sonic booms announced more ordnance incoming.
‘Try!’ snarled Sevatar. ‘Lord Curze is here somewhere.’ Manek backed off. Sevatar was not known for his empathy.
The rest of the command squad drew up with Sevatar and Manek as shells rained down.
‘Erasure zone four blocks away and closing,’ said Ashmenkai Vor, pointing back the way they had come. ‘They’re tracking over the city in our direction.’ He was too wise to call the First Captain’s plan out for idiocy, but put his concern into the tone of what he said.
‘Auspex,’ said Sevatar. His head didn’t stop moving, constantly searching for a clean way through the burning sector. A starship lance strike hit a few streets away, sending liquid ripples through the earth. Perturbed by the groundquake, a building collapsed with an all too human moan. Debris from its demise bounced from their armour.
‘That was close. This hunt is going to kill us all.’
‘Be quiet, Vor. We’re going back with Lord Curze or we’re not going back at all.’ The auspex sweep was taking too long. ‘Data, now!’ Sevatar demanded. The strain of losing their gene-father was evident in his voice. His warriors glanced at one another.
‘Sir, the auspex is little more use than our sensoriums. I require a little time.’ Gish Tovor was calm in the face of Sevatar’s anger.
‘Get me a lock on the primarch.’
‘This area is thick with biosigns, First Captain.’
‘Can anyone raise Shang?’ said Manek.
‘Why would we want to do that?’ asked Vor.
‘He’s the equerry. He should be where the primarch is,’ said Janka Fen, the final member of the group.
‘As much as it’s going to disappoint you all, I cannot raise Shang or anyone else,’ Tovor said. He looked skywards, where the smoke and steam raised by the bombardment flashed with destructive energies. ‘We are in the proverbial eye of the storm. Nothing is coming into this sector, and nothing is going out. They could drop a magma bomb on our heads, and nobody would be any the wiser what happened to us.’
‘Someone’s probably about to do that,’ said Vor.
Sevatar’s vox feed ran foul with the worst Nostraman curses.
‘This way,’ he said, pointing through the shifting veils of smoke towards a building at the end of the street massive enough to defy the murk.
‘You have a location, sir?’ asked Tovor.
‘No,’ said Sevatar, setting off at a run. ‘But any direction is better than standing around with you imbeciles.’
The bombardment was creeping closer, and the squad rushed towards the building in their haste to remain ahead of it. There were a few pockets of resistance left in the city, and the squad did not have time to take the proper care. A single gunshot cracked from behind a broken column, answered by a dozen mass reactives from the running Night Lords’ guns that obliterated the stone and the man sheltering behind.
‘Brave,’ said Vor.
‘Stupid,’ said Manek.
There was no more resistance after that.
Every single window in the building had leapt from its frame and lay smashed on the ground around the frontage. Sevatar’s men crashed through the debris, their massive boots reducing glass shards to powder. The heavily decorated main doors had also been blasted out from inside. Three large pieces clung to the hinges. The rest had been turned to blackened shreds of bronze fanning out from the portal. Fire belched from windows a hundred stories above as the unit ran from the street into the grand entrance hall, now a precarious scrap pile full of broken wood and steel. Despite fires guttering in various places in the building, there was little smoke in there, a thin blue haze instead of the thick black plumes of incinerated flesh outside.
Sevatar had no data on what the building had been. There was an insufficient amount of it left to decide for himself. A direct lance hit had cored it from pinnacle to basement, gifting it with an atrium. Rooms once clos
ed off now brazenly opened themselves to the air. The damage was impressively precise. The giant laser cannons hit deep and hard, but they were surgical tools. A large one might vaporise everything in a forty-metre diameter, but damage beyond this point was caused by direct heat and secondary shockwave. If the secondary effects were blunted somehow, it was not unknown for objects only metres away from the target point to survive unharmed. Floors hung ragged beams over the new gap. Liquid from broken pipes gathered soot from the walls and ran filthy black waterfalls down to ground level. Flames licked from burning furniture, and everywhere drifted sheets of paper swirling in the thermals, some ablaze, mingling with fat cinders of corpse ash.
Fen whistled. ‘Look at this place. Why are we doing this? This planet was ours already. Why has the Night Haunter come down here?’
Sevatar knew why. He didn’t say.
‘Who knows what the primarch’s will is. Perhaps he wishes to make himself a new domicile. Now it has been remodelled, this looks like the sort of place Lord Curze might favour,’ said Vor.
Tovor made himself busy with his auspex.
‘Quiet,’ said Sevatar. The squad irritated him. Curze was missing, at danger from his own fleet. An itch at the edge of his consciousness dragged his attention upwards through the ragged mess of the lance hit. It wasn’t exactly chance that had brought them here. He didn’t like to acknowledge his curse, let alone use it, but he saw little alternative to letting his latent powers guide them under the circumstances.
‘Up,’ he commanded. The others looked at each other when he gave no reason for his decision. Tovor glanced up from the screen mounted on the back of his arm.
‘Sir? I have no reading.’
‘Now!’ Sevatar said.
Vor shrugged. ‘You heard him,’ he said. ‘Up!’ And he jogged towards the remains of the monumental stair. The rest followed after.
Sevatar led them out onto the fiftieth floor. Around a corner lay five dead legionaries.
‘Bodies,’ said Fen.
‘Endless night, they’re ours,’ said Vor. He ran to the first. ‘Ninety-sixth company, Twelfth Claw,’ he said, reading the markings and notched runes decorating the armour plate. He looked closer. ‘What by the… His armour!’ said Vor. He maglocked his bolter to his leg and heaved the body over, revealing the true extent of the fallen legionary’s injuries.
Manek joined him.
‘He’s been excruciated.’ He squatted down beside the fallen legionary for a better look. Shattered chest armour exposed seeping viscera. The ceramite was obliterated, but the fused ribs had been carefully excised and the skin around peeled back with surgical precision.
Ashmenkai Vor shook his head. ‘Mutilated. Who had the time for this?’
Manek played his narthecium over the dead warrior. ‘His enhancements have been removed. His geneseed is gone.’
‘There’s another one over here,’ said Tovor. ‘Same Claw, same wounds.’
‘Who would do that? The natives? What weapon do they have to crack battleplate?’ said Vor. ‘And why take the Emperor’s gifts?’
‘None,’ said Manek. ‘These wounds were inflicted by power blades, set in pairs, wide-spaced. Artificier lightning claws.’
‘Mercy,’ said Fen.
‘And Forgiveness,’ said Tovor.
‘The primarch’s weapons,’ said Manek.
Vor got to his feet.
‘Captain, is he here?’ called Vor, his crackling voice crashing through the hush.
Sevatar did not answer, but pushed on for the back of the building, past the blackened shaft cored out by the lance hit.
Doors opened on a wrecked auditorium. The ceiling of the theatre was holed in many places, letting in colourless shafts of light heavy with motes of ash. A smashed stage occupied much of the front. Dusty chairs sat in rows on a shallow incline. Sevatar noted all this in an instant, faster even than his armour scanned and labelled it all for him in flickering columns of runes. But what hit him first was the smell – the spicy scent of spilled legionary blood, and innards scooped from their proper places.
Konrad Curze was at the epicentre of the slaughter.
‘My lord,’ said Sevatar.
Curze squatted upon a pile of wrecked transhuman flesh and shattered armour in the darkest part of the theatre, away from the slanting beams of light.
Curze turned to face his warriors. His chin was streaked with blood. Shreds of engineered organ flesh stuck between his teeth. He held a severed arm loosely in his hands.
‘Sevatar?’ said Curze. His brow wrinkled, and he blinked slowly. ‘Why are you here? It is dangerous. The bombardment.’ He waved the flopping limb up at the ceiling.
‘We have come for you,’ said Sevatar. ‘You are at risk.’
The Night Haunter shook his head, sending his unkempt black hair swinging to and fro. There had been a time near the beginning of the war when he adopted higher standards of personal hygiene, as befitted a lord of men. Lately he had returned to his old ways.
‘I am not at risk!’ said Curze. ‘You are the one at risk, coming here.’
‘I doubt you’d survive a lance hit yourself,’ said Sevatar gently. He approached his genesire. The others, unsure what to do, fanned out uneasily, looking for enemies and finding only shattered chairs and fallen drapes.
‘You found them,’ said Sevatar.
‘Your brothers here would not listen.’ Curze smiled sadly at Sevatar. ‘I have disciplined them.’
‘Sev,’ shouted Vor. ‘What is happening? These are ninety-sixth. They’re all new, aren’t they? Fresh recruits. What’s going on?’
‘Be quiet, Vor, this is not your concern,’ said Sevatar.
The primarch held the arm by its elbow, and poked a helm with it. The fingers curled in on themselves. ‘I’ll tell him, my good little son,’ said Curze sourly. ‘These warriors who came here in midnight clad exceeded their remit. They overreached their ambitions for slaughter.’
‘What does he mean, Sevatar?’
‘I said shut up, Vor!’ said Sevatar.
‘I won’t shut up. Our lord has killed his sons, our brothers!’
‘I have,’ said Curze. He looked in mild surprise at the severed arm held. ‘Yes. Why do we kill the way we do, Ashmenkai Vor? Why do we skin and torture? Why do we hurt those we would save?’
‘To strike fear,’ responded Vor. ‘Fear is the greatest of all weapons. Fear will cow a world when guns will not. We spill blood to save blood.’
Curze nodded. ‘That is so. What is the utility of terror?’
‘Terror is a clean blade. Its cut disarms opponents without doing them harm. Terror is the friend of compliance.’
‘You have my teachings well at heart. What of the innocents we must slaughter?’
Vor’s voice became hard. ‘The few must die in pain so the many can live in peace. Fear is the road to civilisation. It is paved with bone and washed with blood, but the destination forgives the sin of the journey.’
‘The ends justify the means.’ Curze sighed. He threw the arm aside. It landed with a soft, heavy thump. ‘These men did not agree with the sentiments you have spoken. They inflicted pain for the sport of it. They continued past the point of optimal terror. They slew to entertain themselves.’ He hunched lower. ‘A poor intake not worthy of the gifts given them.’
The bombing rumbled on outside.
‘Then the bombardment, it is to hide their crimes from the other Legions?’ said Manek.
‘You at least, Camen Manek, are blessed with a little brain,’ Curze said. ‘A city burns when it should not, all for the errors of these… criminals.’
‘We should return to the fleet, my lord. I promise to convene the Kyroptera at the first opportunity,’ said Sevatar. ‘We shall conduct a purge of inappropriate recruits.’
A grunt greeted Sevatar’s promise. ‘It will not help. It is too late for that now,’ said Curze. ‘The serpent has bitten. The poison is inside the body and begins its work. I have seen it.’
‘My lord…’
Curze silenced him with a gesture. His head came up, sniffing at the air like a hound.
‘We are no longer alone.’
Tovor’s auspex let out a single ping.
‘Weapons!’ commanded Sevatar. The command Claw brought up their bolters.
‘I am detecting battleplate power outputs all around us,’ said Tovor. ‘Multiple returns. Eight at least.’
‘I have clear biosign readings,’ said Manek. ‘By the walls. In the shadows.’
‘There’s nothing there!’ said Vor.
Shadows moved around the periphery of the auditorium. Uncertain target locks flickered over undulations in the dark. White outlines on red lens feeds twisted awkwardly, attempting to find something that did not wish to be seen. The sensorium did better than Sevatar’s eyes. He blinked, but his vision stubbornly refused to see what his armour told him was there.
A single Nostraman rune blinked steadily on Sevatar’s helm display.
Threat.
‘Draw in. Protect the primarch,’ he commanded. He activated the magnetic binders on his bolter and slapped it to his thigh, and plucked his chainglaive from his back.
The command Claw fell back around their lord. Curze remained motionless, disinterested.
Bolts racked into chambers. The shadows ceased their movement.
‘I have steady targets,’ said Tovor. ‘Sharing.’
The white outlines flickered on Sevatar’s displays into the shapes of Space Marines in full war-plate. And yet he could not actually see them.
‘Should we open fire?’ said Vor, his voice thick with the desire to fight.
‘Hold,’ said Curze. ‘Lower your weapons.’
Reluctantly, Sevatar’s warriors obeyed.
The shadows rippled. Black armoured Space Marines detached themselves from puddles of darkness, like plastek sculptures rising from tar. Where only targeting data had been before, Sevatar now saw a full squad of XIX Legion veterans, materialising from darkness to fill the outlines painted by his cogitator. His eyes ached, begging him to tear off his winged helm and rub them. This could not be. Nostraman born could see into any shadow. The Ravens should not have been able to hide so completely, but they had.