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  ‘Throne, I don’t want to die here.’

  Septimus didn’t turn to look at her. His focus was entirely on the ammunition readouts, which were dropping with heart-wrenching speed. He clicked the vox live.

  ‘This is the VIII Legion Thunderhawk Blackened.’

  ‘It’s not working,’ Eurydice swallowed her panic at his desperate attempts. ‘The Covenant can’t hear you. Talos can’t hear you.’

  ‘Shut up,’ he replied. ‘This is the VIII Legion Thunderhawk Blackened, hailing the battle-barge Hunter’s Premonition. Do you read?’

  ‘The… the what?’

  ‘Another one of our ships is in orbit,’ he said. ‘One of the Night Lords’ flagships.’

  ‘Why aren’t you shooting?’

  He didn’t even need to glance at the ammo displays. ‘Because every gun that can track a target this close to the hull is out of shells.’

  The cockpit shook again, this time hard enough to throw Eurydice back onto her chair.

  ‘Throne!’ she shouted. Septimus winced.

  ‘That wasn’t good. They’re inside.’

  ‘What?’

  He didn’t answer her. ‘This is the VIII Legion Thunderhawk Blackened, hailing the battle-barge Hunter’s Premonition. Please respond.’

  Voices could be heard yelling in the deck below. The prisoners that had survived the annihilation offered by the heavy bolters were definitely inside now.

  ‘Damn it.’ Septimus abandoned the console and pulled the curved hacking blade that was strapped to his calf. ‘Worth a try.’

  Eurydice tossed him one of the pistols.

  ‘Looks like I won’t be guiding your heretic masters through the Sea of Souls after all.’ She smiled a nasty little grin, somewhere between bitterness, terror and triumph.

  Septimus raised his pistol at the closed cockpit door. ‘We’ll see.’

  IX

  FOUR GODS

  ‘Our brothers run to the edges of the Imperium to cower in the shadows of the Dark Gods that protect them. Only we, the Night Lords, the sons of Konrad Curze, are strong enough to stand alone. We will bring our wrath upon the empire that betrayed us, and though the ages may see us divided and broken by the endless war ahead, we will stand untainted until the stars themselves die.’

  – The war-sage Malcharion

  Excerpted from his work, The Tenebrous Path,

  Talos opened his eyes to nothingness.

  To one who saw through pitch darkness as naturally as a mortal man saw in daylight, this was both unwelcome and unfamiliar. He turned, still seeing nothing, unsure if this was because there was nothing to see in the blackness or if he had lost his sight. It occurred to him with no small amusement that he’d inflicted this very fate on so many mortals over the years, forcing them to awaken in the darkness of the Covenant’s interior. A cautious smile spread across his lips as he enjoyed the irony.

  The air was cold on his flesh.

  Flesh? At the first hints of the sensation, he could see himself now – his hands before his face, bone-white and blue-veined, and his tunic of dark weave. He was out of his battle plate. How could this be? Had his wound been so terrible that First Claw had cut him from his armour and…

  Wait. His wound.

  His pale hands pulled open the front of his robe, baring his chest to the darkness. His torso, a pale, sculpted echo of ancient Romanii marble statues of their warlike gods, was unbroken by any wound. Across his sternum were the junction plugs and connection sockets required to link into the powered systems of his armour, and he could make out the hard shell of the black carapace implanted beneath his skin, forming the sub-dermal armour that sheathed his form in additional protection and allowed him to interface with his battle plate’s senses.

  But no wound.

  ‘Talos,’ a voice spoke from the blackness. He turned to meet it, hands reaching for weapons that didn’t exist here, wherever here was.

  The speaker was a Night Lord. Talos recognised the armour instantly, for it was his own.

  In the nothingness, he faced himself, staring at his armoured image with something approaching fury.

  ‘What madness is this?’

  ‘A test,’ his reflection said, removing its helm. The face beneath the helmet was, and was not, his own visage. Eyes of silver stared back at him, and the centre of his forehead was branded with a stylised rune of sickening devotion. The burn mark was still fresh, still trickling blood down his reflection’s face.

  ‘You are not me,’ Talos said. ‘I would never wear the slave mark of the Ruinous Powers.’

  ‘I am what you might be,’ his image smiled, revealing teeth as silver as his eyes. ‘If you were bold enough to unlock your potential.’

  And if you will not hear this offer from me, you will hear it from my allies. The Warmaster’s words came back to him now, trickling into his consciousness as the blood trickled into his reflection’s alien eyes.

  ‘You are not one of the Ruinous Powers,’ he said to the image before him. ‘You are not a god.’

  ‘Am I not?’ it replied, smiling indulgently.

  ‘No god would be so brazen, so unsubtle. You would turn your eyes upon one soul? Never.’

  ‘I turn my eyes to a trillion souls with each passing moment. It is the nature of a god to exist in such a way.’

  An ugly thought clawed its way up from Talos’s doubts to reach his lips. ‘Am I dead?’

  ‘No,’ the god smiled again, ‘though you are wounded in the world of flesh.’

  ‘Then this is the warp? You have taken my spirit from my body.’

  ‘Be silent. The others come.’

  He was right. Other figures manifested about him – one behind, one to the left, one to the right, taking the cardinal points around where he stood in the darkness. He couldn’t focus upon them. Each time he turned, he saw nothing except the others existing at the edges of his vision.

  ‘This,’ said the first figure, ‘is what I offer you.’ He reached out a gauntleted hand to Talos. ‘You are keen of mind and great of vision. You know your armies of god-sons will fail without true gods to lead them. Your flesh gods have fallen. Your fathers are slain. You are godless, and in godlessness lies defeat.’

  ‘Touch me and die,’ the Astartes warned. ‘Mark my words, false god. If you touch me, you will die.’

  ‘I am Slaa Neth. I am the One Who Thirsts. I am a god, more than your gene-father ever was. And this,’ the figure repeated, ‘is what I offer you.’

  Talos…

  …opened his eyes to a battlefield.

  A battlefield he claimed, heart and soul. The enemy, the Imperial army, was reduced to a graveyard of wrecked tanks and corpses that reached from horizon to horizon.

  He stood above his warriors as they kneeled before him, feeling the pleasant sting of some vicious new battle chemical stimulant flooding his veins. He was wounded, for there were cracks in his swollen armour where reddish ichor flowed down his war-plate. These wounds, great rents and rips in his flesh open to the chill air of the battlefield, ached with a pleasure so intense he cried his thanks to the stars above.

  Was this what it was to be a primarch? To laugh at wounds that would destroy even an Astartes? To feel war as an amusing diversion, while crushing a million enemies under the might of invincible armies?

  Perhaps this was what the Night Haunter had felt. This exaltation. Blood-slick claws tore fresh rents in his cheek as he scratched himself, laughing at the delicious pain. Pain itself became a joke to those who could never die.

  ‘Prince Talos,’ his troops were shouting up at him. ‘Prince Talos.’

  No, not shouting. Worshipping. They bowed and cried and prayed for his attention.

  This…

  ‘…is wrong,’ Talos growled. ‘The Night Haunter was never exalted above us as a perfect, immortal being. He was moribund and cursed, stronger for all the trials and agonies he endured.

  ‘This,’ he finished, turning from Slaa Neth, ‘is not how he lived. It is no
t how I will live, either.’

  ‘Cyrion,’ the figure smiled. Talos hadn’t ever smiled like that in his life.

  ‘What of him?’ the Astartes narrowed his black eyes, instinctively reaching for weapons that weren’t there.

  ‘His soul has felt my caress. Your brother hears the fears of every living thing. My gift to him.’

  ‘He resists.’

  ‘On the surface, he resists. The parts of his mind that shout silently relish the sounds of weeping souls. He feeds on fear. He enjoys what he senses.’

  ‘You are lying,’ Talos said, but his broken conviction was evident in the growl. ‘Begone.’

  The first figure faded with a laugh, unseen by Talos, who now stared at the second. He wasn’t surprised to see another image of a Night Lord, his own armour facing him once more. Talos felt a smile creeping across his lips at the sight: it was his armour laid bare, the cannibalism and repairs left unpainted and visible to the naked eye. His chestplate was still the deep blue of the Ultramarines. The armour of his leg was the royal yellow of the Imperial Fists, and the thigh guard attached was the gunmetal grey of the crippled Steel Confessors Chapter. A harlequin’s display of colours and allegiances made up the figure’s war-plate, and Talos lost himself in the memories of where and when each piece was taken. Most, he’d not even thought about for years. Decades, even.

  The shoulder guard ripped from the corpse of a Crimson Fists veteran was a particularly pleasant recollection. They’d fought hand to hand, an uncomplicated brawl of fury against fury, gauntlets pounding cracks in each other’s armour until Talos had managed to crush the other warrior’s windpipe. Once the loyalist Astartes was strangled into unconsciousness, Talos had broken his spine and smashed his skull open against the hull of First Claw’s waiting Land Raider. With the Imperial Fist finally dead, the Night Lord let the body fall to the ground.

  Strange, how the centuries were affecting his memory. He’d believed once that his recollection was almost eidetic. Now, he realised he’d forgotten the most ferocious three minutes of fighting in his entire life.

  The second figure removed his helm, showing a face that mirrored his own but for the curving symbol tattooed on its pale cheek.

  ‘You know me,’ the second figure said, and it was right, Talos did know. He recognised the faintly patronising cadence in the man’s speech, and the sickly sweet scent rising from his armour. The same smell emanated from the Exalted.

  ‘You are the Shaper of Fate,’ Talos said. ‘Vandred is one of your slaves.’

  The figure nodded, his black eyes a perfect image of Talos’s own. ‘He is one of mine. A champion of my cause, a beneficiary of my gifts. Not a slave. His will is his own.’

  ‘I believe differently.’

  ‘Believe what you will. He is of some value to me. You, however, could be so much more.’

  ‘I have no interest in…’

  …power.

  That was the first sensation that drummed from his twin hearts, as though they pushed strength itself through his body with each dual beat. This was not the laughable power of blithe immortality and pleasure, but something altogether more familiar. He turned his head to regard the others on the command deck.

  The Atramentar, all eight of them, knelt before him. Beyond them, the bridge crew worked their stations; each and every one a human with a servitor aide, all working diligently.

  He gestured to the Terminators abasing themselves before him.

  ‘Rise.’

  They rose, taking their places flanking his throne.

  As clear as the sound of his own breathing within his battle helm, as real as his own red-bathed sight, he felt the sudden surety that one of the Atramentar would speak. It would be about the Exalted’s punishment.

  ‘Lord,’ growled Abraxis, the Atramentar warrior closest to the throne. ‘The Exalted awaits your judgement.’

  He knew then, before he even spoke, that the Exalted would break under thirty-eight night cycles of physical and psychic torture. The Atramentar could provide the former. Talos himself would provide the latter.

  ‘Mark my words, brothers,’ Talos said. ‘He will not last forty nights under our care.’

  The eight Terminators nodded, knowing he spoke the truth, knowing he had foreseen it in the winds of fate.

  ‘We are one hour from our destination, lord,’ said one of the mortal bridge officers. Talos closed his eyes, and smiled at the images he saw imprinted in his mind.

  ‘When we re-enter realspace, seek the engine signatures of three freighters using the third moon as shield against auspex returns. Cripple them quickly, and ready First, Second and Third Claws for boarding actions.’

  The whispers began. They thought he couldn’t hear them – the whispers about his new power, about 10th Company’s resurging strength. Let them praise him in whispers. He needed no obsequiousness to his face.

  Talos relaxed into the command throne, letting his thoughts drift into the infinity of what was yet to come, feeling the skeins of fate like a thousand threads under his fingertips. Each strand led to a possible future that played out before his eyes, if he merely concentrated for a single moment. The future…

  ‘…is unwritten.’ He took a breath, feeling naked without his armour and swallowing the rising urge to slay these apparitions before him. ‘I am a seer, and I know the path of the future is darkened by choices yet unmade.’

  His reflection, in its salvaged armour, shook its head. ‘I can offer you the secret sight any mortal must have in order to pierce the mists.’

  ‘My second sight is pure.’ Talos spat on the chestplate of the patchwork armour, where – much to his discomfort – the Imperial eagle still shone undefiled. ‘Yours is the bane of sanity. Leave.’

  He turned to the third, aware of a buzzing sound that felt almost tactile, crawling against his skin. Flies covered the armour of the third figure, fat and blood-red, though patches of occasional blue showed through the insect vermin as they swarmed over the armour’s surface in a rippling, random tide.

  The figure wore no helm. The face was his own, blighted by swollen sores and infected cuts. Through cracked lips which bled a thin orange fluid, the figure shook its head, and spoke with the voice of a grunting, drowning beast.

  ‘I was summoned here,’ it said, ‘but you will never be one of my champions. I have no use for you, and you have no will to wield the power I offer.’

  Talos fixed on the first point of cohesion in all this foolish madness. ‘Who summoned you?’

  ‘One of your kind wove his pleas into unspace for a flicker of my attention. A magus, begging into the warp.’

  ‘An Astartes? A Night Lord? A human?’

  The figure faded, taking its rank stench into oblivion as it went.

  ‘Who summoned you?’ Talos cried into the darkness.

  When silence was the only reply, he turned to the fourth and final figure, the act of facing it bringing it into being.

  The last figure showed the greatest deviation from Talos’s own image, and that alone set the Night Lord’s lip into a disrespectful sneer. This figure, unlike the others, was in motion as if unable to remain still. It swayed from foot to foot, hunched over akin to a beast ready to leap, breathing rasping from its helmet’s vox speakers.

  The armour itself was red, the red of a body’s darkest blood, edged in bronze so filthy it looked as dull and worthless as copper. It was still his armour, but lacking his familiar trophies and sporting fresh battle damage, as well as the repainted surfaces and bronze modifications, made it an unnerving sight. Seeing his most treasured possession so twisted…

  ‘Make this good,’ he said, teeth clenched.

  The figure reached up, removing its helm with shaking hands. The face it revealed was a mess of scars, burns and bionics, framing a malevolent grin.

  ‘I am Kharnath,’ it grunted through the toothy smile.

  ‘I know that name.’

  ‘Yes. Your brother Uzas cries it as he takes skulls for my throne.
’

  ‘He is one of your slaves?’ Talos couldn’t tear his eyes from seeing his own face so damaged. Half of the head was replaced by oil-smeared bionic plating that fused with raw, inflamed skin at the edges. The flesh that remained was blistered and uneven from burn scarring, or darkened by badly-sealed cuts from what must have been horrendous blows to offset the enhanced healing of Astartes physiology.

  Most unnerving of all was the way he swayed, hunched over and ape-like, with the same dead-eyed grin Uzas wore when trying to maintain his attention on a difficult conversation.

  ‘Blood,’ it wheezed, ‘and souls. Blood for the Blood God. Souls for the Soul Eater.’

  ‘Is Uzas your slave? Answer me.’

  ‘Not yet. Soon. Soon he will stand as a champion among my warriors. But not now. Not yet.’

  ‘Whoever summoned you to win me to your allegiance has wasted their time. This is almost laughable.’

  ‘Time is short,’ the figure still grinned. ‘And such sights I have to show you.’

  Talos had more insults to offer, more rejections to voice, but found he couldn’t speak. His lungs locked, feeling like slabs of quivering stone behind his fused ribs. It was a savage echo of the moment he’d been poisoned, and he felt the same sensation as the meat within his body shuddered, stealing his breath. This time, as he fell to his knees, his breathless wheezes weren’t curses, but laughter.

  The warrior of blood was fading. Talos knew in the world of flesh, his lungs were purging the taint that brought him here.

  ‘Witness my gifts,’ Kharnath said, desperate now, ferocious in his eagerness. ‘See the strength I offer. Do not abandon this one chance!’

  ‘Go back to hell,’ the Night Lord grinned through bloody teeth, and vomited black mist into the nothingness.

  Talos opened his eyes again.

  Immediately, he felt vulnerable. He was on his back. Prone.

  Filtered through the red of his visor display, he recognised the scarred ceiling of the mess hall, and his targeting reticule marked three figures standing above him. He did not know who they were or what their presence indicated – all three were mortals in dark robes marked by blasphemous symbols, backing away as soon as his consciousness returned.