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  ‘Preysight,’ he said, and their vague identities were further masked, reduced to the rich blur of thermal traces.

  The first died as Talos rose to his feet and pounded his fist into the human’s face. The Night Lord felt the man’s head give with a wrenching snap of skull bone, and the corpse spun away without another sound. He was on the second robed figure before the first had hit the rubble-strewn ground, gauntlets clasped around the mortal’s frail neck, eliciting several wet clicks as he squeezed and twisted. The mortal’s eyes bulged as the sound of dry twigs snapping echoed into the air. Once the man’s head was wrenched backwards, after several seconds of teasing enjoyment, Talos let that body fall in turn.

  The third figure was trying to escape, running for a set of double doors that led deeper into the prison complex. Three sprinted strides brought the Night Lord within reach, and he clawed at the fleeing heat-blur. The thermal smear screamed in his hands.

  He wasn’t even hurting it, yet.

  Talos lifted the smudged miasma of reds and yellows off the ground, and voided his preysight. A human face, male, middle-aged and weeping, met his natural vision.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ the Astartes growled through his vox speakers.

  ‘Please,’ the man wept, ‘please don’t kill me.’ Through his helm’s olfactory receptors, Talos scented the cloying incense on the mortal’s robes, and the sour reek of his breath. He was infected with… something. Something within his body. A cancer, perhaps, eating at his lungs…

  Taint. He reeked of taint.

  Talos let the man stare into the impassive skulled face of his helm for several more beats of his panicked, mortal heart. Let the fear build. The words of his gene-father, the teachings of the VIII Legion: Show the prey what the predator can do. Show that death is near. The prey will be in your thrall.

  ‘Do you wish to join your friends in death?’ he snapped, knowing his helm’s speakers turned the threat into a mechanical bark.

  ‘No, please. Please. Please.’

  Talos shivered involuntarily. Begging. He had always found begging particularly repulsive, even as a child in the street gangs of Atra Hive on Nostramo. To reveal that level of weakness to another being…

  With a feral snarl, he pulled the man’s weeping, pleading face against the cold front of his helm. Tears glistened on the ceramite. Talos felt his armour’s machine-spirit roil at the new sensation, like a river serpent thrashing in deep silt. It woke again to feed on the mortal’s sorrow and fear.

  ‘Tell me,’ the Night Lord growled, ‘your master’s name.’

  ‘R-Ruv–’

  Talos snapped the mortal’s neck, and stalked from the room.

  Ruven.

  Ruven resisted the urge to shrink before the Warmaster’s displeasure.

  Abaddon’s claw scraped less than lovingly over the sorcerer’s shoulder guard, tearing the oath scroll that was bound there. Several strips of the hallowed parchment ghosted to the ground, floating patiently on the breath of an invisible wind.

  ‘He has awakened early,’ Abaddon repeated Ruven’s last words back to him.

  ‘Yes, my Warmaster. And,’ – he hated to add this – ‘he has slain my acolytes.’

  Abaddon gurgled laughter through a fanged maw. ‘You were of the Night Lords before you came to my Legion, yet their actions surprise you now.’

  Ruven inclined his helm with its lightning bolts painted onto the black ceramite. He was both intrigued and confused by the Warmaster’s rhetorical statement.

  ‘Yes, my Warmaster.’

  ‘That makes your carelessness doubly entertaining.’

  Abaddon and Ruven stood on the ground floor of the prison complex, overseeing the ragged march of convicts towards the waiting slave ship that rested, slug-shaped and fattened for cargo capacity, on the dusty red plain beneath the prison mountain. Legion serfs, servitors and the hulking form of black-clad Astartes directed the column of convicts, occasionally serving out beatings or – in a few instances – executions, if a convict’s jubilation at freedom brought him to attempt an escape.

  Robed acolytes, dressed identically to the humans Talos had slaughtered only minutes before, walked alongside the column, proselytising about the glory of the Warmaster, the false rule of the Golden Throne, the abominations done in the Emperor’s name by His armies, and the inevitability of the Imperium’s demise in the name of justice. Several of these priests shrieked at the thousands of prisoners in gibbering tongues unknown to all but the Dark Gods’ favoured servants, seeking any recognition within the convicts’ eyes, hoping to stumble across a Chaos-tainted individual and raise such a blessed scion of the Ruinous Powers out of the ragtag cannon fodder regiments of slaves being formed from the prison world’s population.

  Solace would be stripped bare of life before the sun rose.

  The sorcerer, Ruven, still said nothing.

  ‘Your acolytes were worthless anyway,’ Abaddon said. ‘Listen to these preachers, howling about the unworthiness of the False Emperor. Such theatrics. And for what? Every soul upon this world was betrayed by the Imperium. Discarded, hated and forgotten – purely for the sin of living their lives as they chose. These men need no ideology beyond learning they will be given the chance to earn vengeance through bloodshed.’

  ‘If my Warmaster does not approve of the methods of the acolytes I have trained–’

  ‘Do I sound like I approve?’

  ‘No, my Warmaster.’

  ‘Cease scurrying, Ruven. Where is the Night Lord prophet now?’

  Ruven closed his eyes, resting his gauntleted hand against the side of his helm as if trying to make out a sound in the distance.

  ‘Making his way to the landing platform, my Warmaster.’

  ‘Good.’ The Astartes helms spiked by the Despoiler’s trophy racks clattered together as Abaddon turned to the sorcerer. ‘You were foolish to let your acolytes remain as long as they did.’

  ‘I was, my Warmaster. Their chants were necessary to maintain the vision, but the prophet threw off the toxins quicker than I had anticipated.’

  ‘Am I to assume he resisted your attempts at conversion?’ Abaddon’s voice betrayed just how little faith he’d had in the idea from the beginning.

  ‘He refused the Dark Ones, my Warmaster. To their faces. This was not some minor conjuration – I summoned reflections of the Four Powers. A trickle of power from the winds of the warp, each to offer their gifts.’

  The blasphemous symbols branded onto Abaddon’s flesh burned and itched with maddening intensity. ‘What did he see? What was so easy to refuse?’

  ‘I know not, my Warmaster. But his vision was true. I felt the presence of the Four. A momentary glance of their attention, if you will.’

  Abaddon chuckled. The sound lacked even a shadow of humour. ‘Grotesque and unsubtle, but deeply amusing.’

  ‘Yes, my Warmaster.’

  ‘Return to orbit, Ruven. Your work here is done.’

  The sorcerer hesitated, clutching his staff made from the fused bones of tyrannic-breed xenos. ‘Do you not wish to me intercept the Night Lord and make another attempt?’

  Abaddon watched the column ahead, where one of his Black Legion Astartes was dragging a screaming prisoner from the line. With a single swipe of a blade, the human’s head left his shoulders.

  ‘He has been made to feel vulnerable, and his Legion looks even weaker in his eyes. The cracks already in his resolve will soon split wide. This was never about converting the puritan bastard in one fleeting moment. It was merely the first move in a much longer game of regicide.’

  ‘Shall I inform the Exalted of our failure?’

  Abaddon grinned. ‘Our failure?’

  ‘My failure, Warmaster.’

  ‘Better. No, I will speak with the Exalted myself and inform him that his pet seer survived untainted. Vandred was a fool to think it would happen so quickly.’

  ‘Then I shall do as you bid, my Warmaster.’

  Abaddon didn’t answer. Such an o
bvious statement needed no affirmation. Instead he turned, irritation touching his feral features for a moment.

  ‘Did you at least kill the slaves?’

  The Exalted had won the orbital battle for him in a fraction of the time Abaddon had planned for. The least he could do to repay the Night Lord commander was a little favour like that.

  ‘Bleed the slaves on board the Thunderhawk,’ the Exalted had asked. ‘But allow nothing to be traced to either Legion.’

  ‘Whatever you wish, brother,’ Abaddon had replied. ‘What reason do you have for making this look like some nonsensical accident?’

  The Exalted had smiled to hear it described like that. ‘A petty reason, but a necessary one. Eliminating the allies of a potential rival. My prophet gathers his resources. He will not take my place as commander.’

  Abaddon found that rather quaint. The Exalted’s claws had to be clean of this murder. Amusing to see how subtle these Night Lords could be when they chose.

  ‘I sent fifty prisoners, my lord,’ said Ruven. ‘Their Thunderhawk was overrun, and the other Night Lords returned to orbit in one of our ships.’

  ‘Fifty.’ How amusingly excessive. ‘Against how many?’

  ‘Two slaves.’

  Abaddon nodded, looking back at the columns of freed convicts. Fifty against two, and the crime apparently blameless.

  At least something had been done right.

  Talos had been unable to reach any of First Claw on the vox, nor had he made contact with Blackened or the Covenant of Blood. He suspected jamming, though to what purpose, he couldn’t begin to guess. Killing them all down here made no sense at all, for there would be no gain for the Black Legion. While Abaddon may have had a thousand faults, with overconfidence first among them, he was not a fool. His grasp of tactical insight had only grown stronger over the centuries.

  Then again, nothing the Black Legion did was ever particularly predictable. Once, Talos thought, they were the best of us.

  How the mighty are fallen.

  As the lifter doors opened, he stared at the bodies spread across the landing platform. It took no time at all to see they had been sectioned by heavy bolter fire. Talos’s attention immediately fixed upon the Thunderhawk, silent on its grey clawed landing gear, its forward gang ramp lowered. Black streaks of burned and twisted metal showed on the blue hull where explosives had been employed to wreck the ramp’s hydraulics. The convicts had evidently been extremely well-equipped.

  Talos was already walking forward, crushing meat and bone underfoot, his blade and bolter at the ready.

  ‘Hnnngh,’ one of the nearby corpses wheezed at him. Talos didn’t break stride. He glanced at the black-toothed, bleeding ruin of a man, and destroyed its head with a single bolt shell. The gunshot’s report echoed off the Thunderhawk’s hull.

  ‘Septimus,’ he voxed.

  The answer he received did not please him.

  X

  THE HUNTERS HUNTED

  They had taken her.

  They had defiled Blackened with the foul mortal scent of panicked fear; they had torn Septimus to pieces, and they had taken Eurydice.

  Talos sheathed his blade and locked his bolter to his thigh, kneeling by the command throne where Septimus lay unmoving. Dark smears of blood across the floor showed where the slave had dragged himself. He lounged in the pilot’s throne, sprawled like a puppet with cut strings, a mess of bloody bruises, broken limbs and shattered bones.

  He still breathed. Talos wasn’t sure how.

  The Night Lord kicked a convict’s corpse aside, removing his helm and kneeling by his artificer. The rich scent of flowing blood and the reeking stink of recent death assailed his naked senses. Septimus coughed flecks of fresh blood to his sliced lips, turning to face the Astartes.

  ‘They took her,’ he said, his voice surprisingly clear. ‘Master, I’m sorry, I can’t see. They took her.’

  Talos withdrew a syringe and a roll of self-adhesive synskin bandage weave from his thigh-mounted narthecium. The supplies he bore now were a hollow shadow of the old Apothecary tools he’d once carried, but those were lost an age ago, on a nameless world in the years after the Great Heresy split the galaxy.

  The first thing he did was inject a cocktail of blood coagulant, painkillers and Astartes plasma into Septimus’s thigh. The second was to bandage what remained of his slave’s face.

  ‘They took her,’ Septimus said again as the weave was wrapped around his eyes.

  ‘I know.’ Talos rose to his feet again, after spraying disinfectant on the open wounds of the mortal’s legs, torso and arms. He tied off the worst gashes with tourniquets, and left the bandages within Septimus’s reach on the control console.

  ‘You must use the rest yourself. The bandages are by the secondary thrust levers.’

  ‘Yes, master.’

  ‘They used explosives to breach the main ramp doorway.’ It was not a question.

  ‘Yes, master.’

  ‘Understood. Rest, Septimus.’

  ‘I can’t see,’ the slave repeated. His voice was still strong, but his head lolled with the onset of both shock and the effects of the syringe’s contents hitting his organs. ‘They took my eyes.’

  ‘They took one of them. The other is damaged, but not lost.’ Talos was searching the corpses, each one felled by las-rounds or vicious hacks of Septimus’s feral world cleaver. The two serfs had fought like tigers before being overwhelmed – the evidence of their defiance was all around, mutilated and silent in death.

  ‘If I can’t see,’ Septimus rested his head against the rest of his throne, ‘I can’t fly us back to the Covenant.’

  ‘That is not important at the moment. Do you know what happened to First Claw?’

  The slave swallowed, the sound thick and wet. ‘Back in orbit. A Black Legion Thunderhawk.’

  Talos breathed out through clenched teeth. An unsubtle trap that, nevertheless, they had all walked right into.

  ‘Be silent,’ he said to Septimus. ‘Do not move.’

  ‘Are you going for her?’

  ‘I said to be silent.’

  ‘Hunt well, master.’

  ‘Always.’

  Talos, Astartes of First Claw, 10th Company, VIII Legion, stalked towards the cockpit doors. He gripped his stolen power blade in one hand, and with the other he replaced his helmet, blanketing his sight in the murder-red of his targeting vision. Over his shoulder, the inhuman warrior spoke four words to his wounded slave, the promise emerging from the skull helm as a mechanical snarl.

  ‘Back in a minute.’

  It had been a long time since the hunter had moved with such purpose.

  Too long, he realised. He had lost grip of his own purity, ignored the simple power brought about from being true to one’s nature.

  He found the instincts flared into life as soon as his twin hearts started beating faster. He ran, the boots of his ceramite second skin pounding on the metal decking. The sound was a welcome warning, a tribal war drum, the threatening heartbeat of an enraged god. The hunter would take no pains to mask his approach. Let the enemy know that death was coming for them.

  He moved through the prison complex, corridor by corridor, not trusting the lift to deliver him, placing his faith in the strength of his own renewed vigour. It dawned on him as he sprinted that in the hour since his poisoning and the awakening from his magus-induced vision, a thick sluggishness had settled into his bones. This weakness faded now, purged in the flow of honest adrenaline.

  Eurydice. Curse them for taking her, and curse the Black Legion for engineering this petty little trap. She was to be the Covenant’s Navigator. Talos would stand for nothing else, not after seeing so clearly in his vision how she would be discovered on the surface of Nostramo’s remnants.

  Lower and lower into the complex, he ran with unrestrained pleasure at the battle stimulants tingling through his blood. His war-plate’s machine-spirit wanted this hunt. Its dim sentience was alive and sharing his joy. They both needed this.r />
  In the corner of his visor, a rune burned its way into his sight. The Nostraman numeral 8. It pulsed with a heartbeat of its own, listing life signs and distance from his position in urgent red lettering. The surgery that blocked Eurydice’s warp eye with a small iron plate was not the only modification the Legion’s servitors had made to the Navigator. Implanted in her throat was a locator beacon, ticking its position to any Night Lords tuned to its frequency. A standard implantation for the slaves of the VIII Legion.

  It took exactly six minutes and thirty-one seconds to reach the basement generatorium chambers. Almost seven minutes of running through stilled, lifeless corridors, past empty cells, and an equal number of hallways still dense with the sweating mortal flesh of convicts waiting to be loaded into slave ships. Some of them had reached out to him, mistaking him for one of their Black Legion saviours. The hunter answered their worship with swings of his blade as he ran, not allowing himself to slow down even to end their irritating blasphemies. Angry, scared cries followed in his wake each time the sword sang. These grunts and bestial shouts of animals herded for the slaughter, panicked by a larger predator, almost brought a grin to his lips. The hunter tried not smile, though their very existences amused him.

  So weak. So scared.

  Six minutes and thirty-one seconds after he had left the Thunderhawk on the landing platform, Talos reached the basement. Able to survive the drop, he’d fallen the final three floors by tearing open a sealed elevator chute door and leaping into the darkness. He landed with an echoing thud that rang out throughout the prelim chambers of the generatorium floors.

  Wasting no time, Talos resumed his sprint, running headlong through the empty control room. Great windows took up one wall, facing out into a vast domed cavern, housing the grinding, clanking generators powering the sprawling prison complex above. Each of the twenty generators stood five storeys tall – edifices of hammering pistons, whirring cogs and thrumming power cell units wedged into their sides like the scales of some caged reptilian beast. Between this miniature city, walkways and gangways were illuminated by the flashing red of emergency lighting.