Void Stalker (14 page)

The last of these armoured coffins depicted the triumphant image of Malcharion, rendered in burnished gold, as he’d been in life. He stood with the helms of two Imperial champions in his hands, crucified by the rays of a moonrise over Terra’s most holy battlements.

‘You,’ Cyrion turned to a nearby adept.

The Mechanicus worker nodded his hooded head. ‘My name is Lacuna Absolutus, sire.’

‘Is work still proceeding on reawakening the war-sage?’

‘The battle interrupted our rituals, sire.’

‘Of course,’ Cyrion said. ‘Forgive me.’ He crossed the chamber to where Deltrian stood. ‘Talos ordered us here to protect you.’

Deltrian didn’t look up from the console. His chrome fingers clicked and clacked at the keypad. ‘I need no protection. Furthermore, reports from all claws report the enemy resistance is ended.’

Cyrion had been listening to the same vox reports. That wasn’t exactly what they’d said. ‘It is not like you to be so imprecise, honoured adept.’

‘Hostilities are almost at their conclusion, then.’

Cyrion was smiling now. ‘You are annoyed, and trying not to let it show. Tell me why.’

Deltrian emitted an irritated blurt of code. ‘Begone, warrior. Many demands press upon my time, and the array of my attention is limited.’

Cyrion laughed. ‘Is this because your requests for assistance weren’t answered? We were engaged in battle, honoured adept. If we’d had the time to walk on the ship’s hull with you, I assure you we would have done as you asked.’

‘My work was critical. The repairs had to be made. If we had committed to a void battle with the enemy cruiser–’

‘But we did not,’ Cyrion rejoined. ‘Did we? Talos tore the moon apart instead. Beautiful overkill, that. The primarch would have laughed and laughed, loving every moment of it.’

Deltrian deactivated his vocabulator, preventing any response based on a moment of emotional temper. He merely nodded to indicate he’d heard the warrior’s words, and continued his work.

It was Lucoryphus that answered, from his vigil by the torture tank. ‘It does not matter. I answered his call.’

Cyrion and the rest of First Claw turned to the Raptor. ‘Yes, after you fled with your rabid pack, leaving us to fight alone.’

‘Enough whining.’ The Raptor’s head jerked on the servos in his neck. ‘You survived, did you not?’

‘No,’ Cyrion replied. ‘Not all of us.’

He worked alone,
with his brother’s blood on his hands.

‘Talos,’ a voice carried over the vox. He ignored it, not even paying heed to whom it belonged.

The extraction of gene-seed wasn’t a complicated process, but it required a degree of delicacy and efficiency made easier with the right tools. More than once in recent years, Talos had ruined gene-seed organs in the heat of battle, cutting them from a corpse with his gladius and pulling them free with his bare hands. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

This was different. He wasn’t carving open one of his distant brothers under enemy fire.

‘You were always a fool,’ he told the dead body. ‘I warned you it would see you dead one night.’

He worked in the stillness of his own meditation chamber, silent but for the humming of his armour joints and the wet-meat sounds of a blade going through flesh. His own narthecium was long gone, lost in a fight decades ago, yet he had no desire to allow Variel to do this.

Splitting the breastbone beneath the black carapace was the most difficult obstacle. The biological augmentations that rendered a Legionary’s bones stronger than a human’s were also a bane to easy surgery. He briefly considered widening the wound close to Xarl’s primary heart, but it would involve burrowing and pulling more meat free.

Talos hefted his gladius, testing the weight a few times. He brought the pommel orb down on Xarl’s solar plexus once, twice, and a third time with a dull thud punctuating each impact. On the fourth, he pounded the pommel down with more strength, cracking the breastbone in a ragged split. Several more thumps widened the crack enough for Talos to curl his fingers around the ribcage, opening his brother’s body like a creaking, cracking book. The smell of burned flesh and bare organs soon thickened the air in the small chamber. He reached a gloved hand into Xarl’s chest cavity, pulling the first globular node free. It resisted at first, tightly bound to the nervous system; the heart of a mesh of veins and muscle meat.

He poured the handful of cold blood and stringy flesh into a medicae canister. In better times, there had been words to say and oaths to speak. None of them felt right now.

Talos clutched Xarl’s limp head, turning it to the side. Moving the body caused a rattle of breath to leave the corpse’s open mouth and exposed lungs. Despite his training, despite all the things he’d seen in his centuries of life, the sound caused his hands to freeze. Some instinctive responses were too human, too tightly bound to a warrior’s core, to go ignored. Bodies breathing was one of them. He felt his blood run cold, just for that moment.

The progenoid organ in Xarl’s throat was much easier to recover. Talos used the tip of his gladius to carve through the skin and sinewy muscle, making a wide wound in the dead flesh. He pulled
out
another handful of bloody tissue and vein-stringy meat, placing it in the canister with the first.

A twist, a seal, and the medicae canister locked tight. A green rune activated along its side.

For several slow breaths, Talos knelt next to his brother’s body, saying nothing, thinking nothing. Xarl’s mutilated remains scarcely resembled the warrior in life – he was a defeated, broken thing of ripped flesh and ruined ceramite. The traitorous thought entered his mind of scavenging his brother’s armour, but Talos suppressed the vulture’s urge. Not Xarl. And in truth, there was little remaining worth the effort of plunder.

‘Talos,’ the vox insisted. He still ignored it, though the voice pulled him from his dead-minded reverie.

‘Brother,’ he said to Xarl. ‘A hero’s burial awaits.’

Talos rose to his feet, moving to his weapon rack. An ancient flamer rested as it had for years, cleaned of all rust and corrosion, its unlit nozzle emerging from a brass daemon’s wide maw. He’d never liked the weapon, scarcely even used it since first tearing it from the hands of a dead warrior of the Emperor’s Children five decades before.

A click of his thumb activated the pilot light. It hissed in the chamber, an angry candle flame casting a sharp glare in the gloom. He slowly aimed the weapon at Xarl’s body, breathing in the scent of his brother’s ruptured flesh and the chemical tang of old promethium oil.

Xarl had been there when Talos first took a life
:
a shopkeeper slain by a boy in the lightless Nostramo night. He’d stood with him as the gang wars swept the cities, always cursing with gutter invective; always first to shoot and last to ask questions; always confident, never regretting a thing.

He was the weapon, Talos thought. Xarl had been First Claw’s truest blade, and the controlled strength that formed their backbone in battle. He was the reason other claws had always backed down from facing them. While Xarl lived, Talos had never feared First Claw losing a fight. They had never liked one another. Brotherhood asked for no friendship, only loyalty. They’d stood back to back as the galaxy burned – always brothers, never friends; traitors together unto the last.

But none of it seemed right to say. The flamer hissed on in the spreading silence.

‘If there is a hell,’ Talos said, ‘you are walking there now.’ He aimed the weapon again. ‘I believe I will see you there soon, brother.’

He pulled the trigger. Chemical fire breathed out in a sudden roar, washing over the body in short bursts. Ceramite darkened. Joints melted. Flesh dissolved. He had a last sight of Xarl’s blackening skull, the bones resting in a silent, eyeless laugh. Then it was lost in the smoke choking the air.

The fire quickly spread to the chamber’s bedding and the scrolls on the walls. The spoiled
-
meat reek of burning human
flesh
turned the cloying air even fouler.

Talos washed the body in a final spread of liquid fire. He stowed the flamer over his shoulder, locked the medicae canister to his thigh, and reached for his weapons last of all. Talos took Xarl’s helm with one hand and his own bolter with the other. Without looking backwards, he strode through the smoke and engaged the door release.

Thick, coiling smoke poured into the hallway beyond, and with it came the smell. Talos walked from the chamber, sealing the door behind him. The fires would die out soon enough, starved of oxygen and fuel in the chamber.

He’d not expected anyone to be waiting. The two humans stood quietly, their cupped hands shielding their mouths and noses from the thinning smoke.

Septimus and Octavia. The seventh and the eighth. Both tall, both dressed in dark Legion uniforms, both permitted, as so few slaves were, to carry weapons. The former stood with his damaged facial bionics clicking each time he blinked or moved his eyes. His long hair framed his face, and Talos – who had little gift for reading human expression beyond terror or anger – could make no sense of the emotion on Septimus’s features.
Octavia
had her hair bound in its usual ponytail, her forehead covered by her bandana. She was getting thin now, and unhealthily pale. This life wasn’t being kind to her, nor was her own biology, as her strength faded to be fed to the child growing inside her.

He recalled his order that the two humans remain apart, and his more recent demand that Septimus remain in the hangar. In this moment, neither seemed to matter.

‘What do you want?’ Talos asked them. ‘There is nothing to salvage from Xarl’s wargear, Septimus. Do not ask.’

‘Variel ordered me to find you, lord. He requests your presence in the apothecarion as a matter of urgency.’

‘And it took both of you to deliver this message?’

‘No.’ Octavia cleared her throat, lowering her hands. ‘I heard about Xarl. I’m sorry. I think… by your standards, by the Legion’s ideals, I mean… he was a good man.’

Talos’s exhalation became a snort, which in turn became a chuckle.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Xarl was a good man.’

Octavia shook her head at the warrior’s sarcasm. ‘You know what I mean. He and Uzas saved me once, just as you did.’

The prophet’s chuckle became laughter. ‘Of course. A good man. A heretic. A traitor. A murderer. A fool. My brother, the
good man
.’

Both humans stood in silence as, for the first time in many years, Talos laughed until his black eyes watered.

XI

FATE

Chaos reigned in
the Primary Apothecarion. On the
Covenant of Blood,
the Legion’s medicae sanctum had been more a morgue than a surgery, becoming a place of stillness and silence – a chamber of cold storage vaults, old bloodstains on the iron tables and memories hanging in the sterile air.

The opposite was true on the
Echo of Damnation.
Variel walked from table to table, through a sea of wounded humanity, his unhelmed face betraying no emotion. Human crew and
legionaries
alike cried out, reaching for him, filling the air with the reek of sweat, the heat of escaping life and the stink of chemical-rich blood.

Hundreds of tables lined the chamber in rows, almost all of them occupied. Mono-tasked lifter servitors hauled corpses from the slabs, dragging living wounded onto the tables in replacement. Drains in the floor suckled at the blood sloshing across the dirty tiles. Medicae servitors and crew members trained in surgery were sweating as they worked. Variel strode through it all, a gore-streaked conductor overseeing a wailing orchestra.

He paused by one gurney, glancing down at the tangled crewman’s body laying there.

‘You,’ he said to a nearby medicae servitor. ‘This one is dead. Remove his eyes and teeth for later use, before incinerating the remains.’

‘Compliance,’ murmured the bloodstained slave.

A hand gripped his vambrace. ‘Variel…’ The Night Lord on the next table swallowed blood before he spoke. His clutch tightened. ‘Variel, graft the new legs onto the stumps and let’s be done with it. Do not keep me here, when we have a world to conquer.’

‘You need rather more than new legs,’ Variel told him. ‘Now remove your hand.’

The warrior gripped tighter. ‘I have to be on Tsagualsa. Don’t keep me here.’

The Apothecary looked down at the wounded
l
egionary. The warrior’s face was half-lost in a wash of blood and burned tissue, baring the skull beneath. One of his arms ended at the bicep, and both legs were fleshy stalks leaking fluid from the ravaged ceramite where his knees had once been. The Genesis Chapter had almost killed this one, no doubt about it.

‘Remove your hand,’ Variel said again. ‘We have discussed this, Murilash. I do not like to be touched.’

The grip only grew tighter. ‘Listen to me…’

Variel clenched the warrior’s hand with his own, prying the fingers back and holding tight. Without a word, he deployed the laser cutters and bone saw from his narthecium gauntlet. The saw bit down.

The warrior cried out.

‘What did you just learn?’ Variel asked.

‘You wretched bastard!’

Variel tossed the severed hand to another servitor. ‘Incinerate this. Ready a bionic left hand with the rest of his planned augmentations.’

‘Compliance.’

In the corner of the apothecarion, where they leaned against the wall watching the organised chaos, Cyrion chuckled and voxed to Mercutian.

‘You were right,’ he said. ‘Variel really is one of us.’

‘I would have cut out Murilash’s heart,’ Mercutian replied. ‘I’ve always loathed him.’ The two warriors lapsed into silence for a time.

‘Deltrian reported they’re back to working on reawakening Malcharion.’

Mercutian’s reply was to sigh. Through the vox, it was a breathy crackle.

‘What?’ Cyrion asked.

‘He will not thank us for awakening him a second time. I would give much to know why Malek of the Atramentar spared the war-sage’s existence.’

‘I would give much to know where in the infinite hells the Atramentar are. Do you believe they went down with the
Covenant
?’

Mercutian shook his head. ‘Not for a moment.’

‘Nor I,’ Cyrion agreed. ‘They didn’t evacuate with the mortals, nor in a Legion gunship. They never reached the
Echo of Damnation.
Which leaves only one choice – they boarded an enemy vessel. They teleported onto a Corsair ship.’

‘Perhaps,’ Mercutian allowed. His tone walked the border between thoughtful and doubting. ‘They would never be able to take a Corsair ship alone.’

‘Are you truly this naive?’ Cyrion grinned behind a faceplate that wept painted lightning. ‘Look how the Blood Reaver treats his Terminator elite. They’re his Chosen. I’m not suggesting the Atramentar mounted an assault on the Corsairs, fool. They betrayed us to them. They
joined
them.’

Mercutian snorted. ‘Never.’

‘No? How many warriors have cast aside the bonds of the First Legions? How many find them irrelevant as the years become decades, and the decades twist into centuries? How many are
legionaries
only in name, after finding a more satisfying, more purposeful path instead of eternally whining over a final vengeance never taken? Every one of us has his own path to walk. Power is a greater temptation for some than ancient, lofty ideals. Some things matter more than old bonds.’

‘Not to me,’ Mercutian said at last.

‘Not to most of us. I am merely saying–’

‘I know what you are saying. I am saying I have no wish to speak of this.’

‘Very well. But there is a tale behind the Atramentar’s disappearance, brother. One we may never know.’

‘Someone knows.’

‘That they do. And I would enjoy excruciating the truth from them.’

Mercutian didn’t reply, and Cyrion allowed the discussion to wane into an awkward lull. Uzas, standing a few metres away from them, was looking down at his red-painted gauntlets.

‘What’s wrong with you now?’ Cyrion asked.

‘My hands are red,’ said Uzas. ‘Sinners have red hands. The Primarch’s Law.’ Uzas lifted his head, turning his bruised and bloody face to Cyrion. ‘What did I do wrong? Why are my hands painted in sinners’ scarlet?’

Mercutian and Cyrion shared a glance. Another moment of rare clarity from their degenerating brother caught them by surprise.

‘You killed many of the
Covenant
’s
crew, brother,’ Mercutian told him. ‘Months ago. One of them was the father of the void-born girl.’

‘That wasn’t me,’ Uzas had bitten his tongue, and blood flowed over his lips, slowly raining down his white chin. ‘I didn’t kill him.’

‘As you say, brother,’ Mercutian replied.

‘Where is Talos? Does Talos know I did not do this?’

‘Peace, Uzas,’ Cyrion rested a hand on the other warrior’s shoulder guard. ‘Peace. Do not let yourself grow aggravated.’

‘Where’s Talos?’ Uzas asked again, slurring now.

‘He will be here soon,’ said Mercutian. ‘The Flayer has summoned him.’

Uzas half-lidded his black eyes, drooling saliva and blood in equal measure. ‘Who?’

‘Talos. You just… You just asked where he was.’

Uzas stood slack-jawed. Blood bubbled at the corner of his thin lips. Even without Legion modification, even had he been left alone as a human boy and never swollen into this broken, avataric living weapon stitched back together after hundreds of battlefields, Uzas would have been a singularly unwholesome and unattractive creature. Everything in the years since only made him fouler to look upon.

‘Uzas?’ Mercutian pressed.

‘Hnnh?’

‘Nothing, brother.’ He shared another glance with Cyrion. ‘It is nothing.’

The three warriors remained silent as the minutes passed on. Again and again, the northern doors opened on grinding tracks. More packs of crew members were arriving each minute, dragging and carrying their wounded.

‘It is surprising to see so many mortals flocking here,’ Mercutian mused.

With medicae stations on many decks, the crew knew that the Primary Apothecarion was the Flayer’s haunt, and few would willingly put themselves beneath his cold gaze and the pressing cuts of his blades.

‘They know their own expendability,’ Cyrion nodded. ‘Only desperation drives them here.’

Talos entered with the latest batch. The prophet ignored the humans around his boots, crossing straight to Variel. Septimus and Octavia trailed him in. The former immediately moved to one of the tables, working to assist the medicae attendant there.

‘Septimus,’ the surgeon grunted in greeting. ‘Start stitching the stomach wound.’

Octavia watched him working, knowing better than to try and offer her help. The mortal crew flinched back from her at all times, no matter her intentions. The curse of the third eye, even when it was hidden beneath her grimy bandana. They all knew what she was, what she did for their lords and masters. None of them wanted to look her way, let alone touch her. So she followed Talos, hanging back what she judged a respectful distance.

Talos walked to Variel, the damage to his armour showing starkly in the apothecarion’s harsher light.

‘Where is Xarl’s corpse?’ the Apothecary asked.

Talos handed him the sealed cryo-canister. ‘That is all you need,’ he said.

Variel took it, his fingers subtly twitching. He disliked others doing inexpert work when he could have performed it to perfection. ‘Very well.’

‘Is that all?’ Talos looked over to Cyrion, Uzas and Mercutian, ready to join them.

‘No. We are long overdue a discussion, prophet.’

‘We have a world to bring to its knees,’ Talos reminded him.

Variel’s eyes – ice-blue to the Nostraman’s inky black – still flitted around the chamber, drinking in the details. It was the one way Talos thought Variel still differed from the Nostraman-born Night Lords. Whether by genetic legacy or simple habit, a great many Eighth Legion warriors would stare in autistic
silence,
gazing at those they were speaking to. Variel’s attention was altogether more fractured.

‘We also have half of our warriors dead or dying,’ the Apothecary pointed out, ‘along with hundreds of mortal crew. There is gene-seed to harvest, and augmetic grafting to perform.’

Talos fingered his temples. ‘Then do what needs to be done. I will take the others down to the surface.’

Variel said nothing for a moment, absorbing the words. ‘Why?’ he said at last. Around him, men and women were still weeping, moaning, screaming. It put Talos in mind of the primarch’s Screaming Gallery, with all the shivering hands reaching out from the walls in fruitful torment. He felt like smiling, really smiling, without knowing why.

‘Why what?’ asked Talos.

‘Why
attack Tsagualsa? Why attack it in the first place? Why rush down there to finish the deed now? You have been less than forthcoming with answers on the matter.’

The blue veins beneath Talos’s cheeks twisted like lightning, following the contours of his scowl. ‘To let the hounds slip the leash and torture as they desire. To let the Eighth Legion be itself. And above all, for the symbolism. This was our world, and we left it barren of life. It should remain that way.’

Variel breathed slowly, his eyes settling on Talos for a long, rare moment. ‘The populace of Tsagualsa, such as it is, are now cowering in their storm shelters, fearful of the nameless wrath that attacked their capital city. They know it will return, and yes – I suspect you are correct – once the Legion slips its leash and toys with the lives of those souls on the surface, every warrior will be energised by the infliction of fear and the wanton slaughter to inevitably follow. But that is not a good enough answer. You are dreaming without recalling what you see. You are acting on visions you scarcely remember, and barely understand.’

Talos remembered the first moment of awakening once more, finding himself chained in the command throne, with the occulus showing Tsagualsa’s grey face from the silent safety of orbit.

‘Where are we?’ he’d said.

First Claw had walked to his side, forming up in a line of snarling joints and impassive, skullish facemasks.

‘You don’t recall your orders to us?’ Xarl had asked.

‘Just tell me where we are,’ he’d demanded.

‘The Eastern Fringe,’ Xarl ha
d
answered. ‘Out of the Astronomican’s light, and in orbit around the world you repeatedly demanded we travel to.’

Variel broke through the prophet’s reverie with a murmur of displeasure. ‘You have not been the same since we took the
Echo of Damnation.
Are you aware of this?’