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  “This looks fragile,” he said.

  The Scout shouted something unheard. Hate burned in his eyes. Talos wasted several seconds just enjoying that expression. That passion.

  He crashed his fist against the visor, smashing it to shards.

  As one corpse froze and another swelled and ruptured on its way to asphyxiation, the Night Lord retrieved his blade, the sword he claimed by right of conquest, and moved back into the darkest parts of the ship.

  “Talos,” the voice came over the vox in a sibilant hiss.

  “Speak, Uzas.”

  “They have sent initiates to hunt us, brother. I had to cancel my preysight to make sure my eyes were seeing clearly. Initiates. Against us.”

  “Spare me your indignation. What do you want?”

  Uzas’s reply was a low growl and a crackle of dead vox. Talos put it from his mind. He had long grown bored of Uzas forever lamenting each time they met with insignificant prey.

  “Cyrion,” he voxed.

  “Aye. Talos?”

  “Of course.”

  “Forgive me. I thought it would be Uzas with another rant. I hear your decks are crawling with Angels. Epic glories to be earned in slaughtering their infants, eh?” Talos didn’t quite sigh. “Are you almost done?”

  “This hulk is as hollow as Uzas’s head, brother. Negative on anything of worth. Not even a servitor to steal. I’m returning to the boarding pod now. Unless you need help shooting the Angels’ children?”

  Talos killed the vox-link as he stalked through the black corridor. This was fruitless. Time to leave—empty-handed and still desperately short on supplies. This… this piracy offended him now, as it always did, and as it always had since they’d been cut off from the Legion decades ago. A plague upon the long-dead Warmaster and his failures which still echoed today. A curse upon the night the VIII Legion was shattered and scattered across the stars.

  Diminished. Reduced. Surviving as disparate warbands—broken echoes of the unity within loyalist Astartes Chapters.

  Sins of the father.

  This curious ambush by the Angels who had tracked them here was nothing more than a minor diversion. Talos was about to vox a general withdrawal after the last initiates were hunted down and slain, when his vox went live again.

  “Brother,” said Xarl. “I’ve found the Angels.”

  “As have Uzas and I. Kill them quickly and let’s get back to the Covenant.”

  “No, Talos.” Xarl’s voice was edged with anger. “Not initiates. The real Angels.”

  The Night Lords of First Claw, Tenth Company, came together like wolves in the wild. Stalking through the darkened chambers of the ship, the four Astartes met in the shadows, speaking over their vox-link, crouching with their weapons at the ready.

  In Talos’s hands, the relic blade Aurum caught what little light remained, glinting as he moved.

  “Five of them,” Xarl spoke low, his voice edged with his suppressed eagerness. “We can take five. They stand bright and proud in a control chamber not far from our boarding pod.” He racked his bolter. “We can take five,” he repeated.

  “They’re just waiting?” Cyrion said. “They must be expecting an honest fight.”

  Uzas snorted at that.

  “This is your fault, you know,” Cyrion said with a chuckle, nodding at Talos. “You and that damn sword.”

  “It keeps things interesting,” Talos replied. “And I cherish every curse that their Chapter screams at me.”

  He stopped speaking, narrowing his eyes for a moment. Cyrion’s skulled helm blurred before him. As did Xarl’s. The sound of distant bolter fire echoed in his ears, not distorted by the faint crackle of helm-filtered noise. Not a true sound. Not a real memory. Something akin to both.

  “I… have a…” Talos blinked to clear his fading vision. Shadows of vast things darkened his sight, “…have a plan…”

  “Brother?” Cyrion asked.

  Talos shivered once, his servo-joints snarling at the shaking movement. Magnetically clasped to his thigh, his bolter didn’t fall to the decking, but the golden blade did. It clattered to the steel floor with a clang.

  “Talos?” Xarl asked.

  “No,” Uzas growled, “not now.”

  Talos’s head jerked once, as if his armour had sent an electrical pulse through his spine, and he crashed to the ground in a clash of war plate on metal.

  “The god-machines of Crythe…” he murmured. “They have killed the sun.”

  A moment later, he started screaming.

  The others had to cut Talos out of the squad’s internal vox-link. His screams drowned out all other speech.

  “We can take five of them,” Xarl said. “Three of us remain. We can take five Angels.”

  “Almost certainly,” Cyrion agreed. “And if they summon squads of their initiates?”

  “Then we slaughter five of them and their initiates’

  Uzas cut in. “We were slaying our way across the stars ten thousand years before they were even born.”

  “Yes, while that’s a wonderful parable, I don’t need rousing rhetoric,” Cyrion said. “I need a plan.”

  “We hunt,” Uzas and Xarl said at once.

  “We kill them,” Xarl added.

  “We feast on their gene-seed,” Uzas finished.

  “If this was an award ceremony for fervency and zeal, once again, you’d both be collapsing under the weight of medals. But you want to launch an assault on their position while we drag Talos with us? I think the scraping of his armour over the floor will rather kill the element of stealth, brothers.”

  “Guard him, Cyrion,” Xarl said. “Uzas and I will take the Angels.”

  “Two against five.” Cyrion’s red eye lenses didn’t quite fix upon his brother’s. “Those are poor odds, Xarl.”

  “Then we will finally be rid of each other,” Xarl grunted. “Besides, we’ve had worse.”

  That was true, at least.

  “Ave Dominus Nox,” Cyrion said. “Hunt well and hunt fast.”

  “Ave Dominus Nox,” the other two replied.

  Cyrion listened for a while to his brother’s screams. It was difficult to make any sense from the stream of shouted words.

  This came as no surprise. Cyrion had heard Talos suffering in the grip of this affliction many times before. As gene-gifts went, it was barely a blessing.

  Sins of the father, he thought, watching Talos’s inert armour, listening to the cries of death to come. How they are reflected within the son.

  According to Cyrion’s retinal chrono display, one hour and sixteen minutes had passed when he heard the explosion.

  The decking shuddered under his boots.

  “Xarl? Uzas?”

  Static was the only answer.

  Great.

  When Uzas’s voice finally broke over the vox after two hours, it was weak and coloured by his characteristic bitterness.

  “Hnngh. Cyrion. It’s done. Drag the prophet.”

  “You sound like you got shot,” Cyrion resisted the urge to smile in case they heard it in his words.

  “He did,” Xarl said. “We’re on our way back.”

  “What was that detonation?”

  “Plasma cannon.”

  “You’re… you’re joking.”

  “Not even for a second. I have no idea why they brought one of those to a fight in a ship’s innards, but the coolant feeds made for a ripe target.”

  Cyrion blink-clicked a rune by Xarl’s identification symbol. It opened a private channel between the two of them.

  “Who hit Uzas?”

  “An initiate. From behind, with a sniper rifle.”

  Cyrion immediately closed the link so no one would hear him laughing.

  The Covenant of Blood was a blade of cobalt darkness, bronze-edged and scarred by centuries of battle. It drifted through the void, sailing close to its prey like a shark gliding through black waters.

  The Encarmine Soul was a Gladius-class frigate with a long and proud histo
ry of victories in the name of the Blood Angels Chapter—and before it, the IX Legion. It opened fire on the Covenant of Blood with an admirable array of weapons batteries.

  Briefly, beautifully, the void shields around the Night Lords strike cruiser shimmered in a display reminiscent of oil on water.

  The Covenant of Blood returned fire. Within a minute, the blade-like ship was sailing through void debris, its lances cooling from their momentary fury. The Encarmine Soul, what little chunks were left of it, clanked and sparked off the larger cruiser’s void shields as it passed through the expanding cloud of wreckage.

  Another ship, this one stricken and dead in space, soon fell under the Covenant’s shadow. The strike cruiser obscured the sun, pulling in close, ready to receive its boarding pod once again.

  First Claw had been away for seven hours investigating the hulk. Their mothership had come hunting for them.

  Bulkhead seals hissed as the reinforced doors opened on loud, grinding hinges.

  Xarl and Cyrion carried Talos into the Covenant’s deployment bay. Uzas walked behind them, a staggering limp marring his gait. His spine was on fire from the sniper’s solid slug that still lodged there. Worse, his genhanced healing had sealed and clotted the wound. He’d need surgery—or more likely a knife and a mirror—to tear the damn thing out.

  One of the Atramentar, elite guard of the Exalted, stood in its hulking Terminator war plate. His skull-painted, tusked helm stared impassively. Trophy racks adorned his back, each one impaled with several helms from a number of loyalist Astartes Chapters: a history of bloodshed and betrayal, proudly displayed for his brothers to see.

  It nodded to Talos’s prone form.

  “The Soul Hunter is wounded?” the Terminator asked, its voice a deep, rumbling growl.

  “No,” Cyrion said. “Inform the Exalted at once. His prophet is suffering another vision.”

  ‘My sons, the galaxy is burning.

  We all bear witness to a final truth – our way is not the way of the Imperium.

  You have never stood in the Emperor’s light.

  Never worn the Imperial eagle.

  And you never will.

  You shall stand in midnight clad,

  Your claws forever red with the lifeblood of my father’s failed empire,

  Warring through the centuries as the talons of a murdered god.

  Rise, my sons, and take your wrath across the stars,

  In my name. In my memory.

  Rise, my Night Lords.’

  – The Primarch Konrad Curze,

  at the final gathering of the VIII Legion

  PROLOGUE

  A GOD'S SON

  It was a curse, to be a god’s son.

  To see as a god saw, to know what a god knew. This sight, this knowledge, tore him apart time and again.

  His chamber was a cell, devoid of comfort, serving as nothing more than a haven against interference. Within this hateful sanctuary, the god’s son screamed out secrets of a future yet to come, his voice a strangled chorus of cries rendered toneless and metallic by the speaker grille of his ancient battle helm.

  Sometimes his muscles would lock, slabs of meat and sinew tensing around his iron-hard bones, leaving him shivering and breathing in harsh rasps, unable to control his own body. These seizures could last for hours, each beat of his two hearts firing his nerves with agony as the blood hammered through his cramping muscles. In the times he was free from the accursed paralysis, when his reserve heart would slow and grow still once again, he would ease the pain by pounding his skull against the walls of his cell. This fresh torment was a distraction from the images that burned behind his eyes.

  It sometimes worked, but never for long. The returning visions would peel back any lesser torment, bathing his mind once more in fire.

  The god’s son, still in his battle armour, rammed his helmed head against the wall, driving his skull against the steel again and again. Between the ceramite helmet he wore and the enhanced bone of his skeleton, his efforts did more damage to the wall than to himself.

  Lost in the same curse that led to his gene-father’s death, the god’s son did not see his cell walls around him, nor did he detect the data streaming across his retinas as his helm’s combat display tracked and targeted the contours of the wall, the hinges of the barred door, and every other insignificant detail in the unfurnished chamber. At the top left of his visor display, his vital signs were charted in a scrolling readout that flashed with intermittent warnings when his twin hearts pounded too hard for even his inhuman physiology, or his breathing ceased for minutes at a time with his body locked in a seizure.

  And this was the price he paid for being like his father. This was existence as the living legacy of a god.

  The slave listened at his master’s door, counting the minutes.

  Behind the reinforced dark metal portal, the master’s cries had finally subsided – at least for now. The slave was human, with the limited senses such a state entailed, but with his ear pressed to the door, he could make out the master’s breathing. It was a sawing sound, ragged and harsh, filtered into a metallic growl by the vox-speakers of the master’s skull-faced helm.

  And still, even as his mind wandered to other thoughts, the slave kept counting the seconds as they became minutes. It was easy; he’d trained to make it instinctive, for no chronometers would work reliably within the warp.

  The slave’s name was Septimus, because he was the seventh. Six slaves had come before him in service to the master, and those six were no longer among the crew of the glorious vessel, the Covenant of Blood.

  The corridors of the Astartes strike cruiser stood almost empty, a silent web of black steel and dark iron. These were the veins of the great ship, once thriving with activity: servitors trundling about their simple duties, Astartes moving from chamber to chamber, mortal crew performing the myriad functions that were necessary for the ship’s continued running. In the days before the great betrayal, thousands of souls had called the Covenant home, including almost three hundred of the immortal Astartes.

  Time had changed that. Time, and the wars it brought.

  The corridors were unlit, but not powerless. An intentional blackness settled within the strike cruiser, a darkness so deep it was bred into the ship’s steel bones. It was utterly natural to the Night Lords, each one born of the same sunless world. To the few crew that dwelled in the Covenant’s innards, the darkness was – at first – an uncomfortable presence. Acclimatisation would inevitably come to most. They would still carry their torches and optical enhancers, for they were human and had no ability to pierce the artificial night as their masters did. But over time, they grew to take comfort in the darkness.

  In time, acclimatisation became familiarity. Those whose minds never found comfort in the blackness were lost to madness, and discarded after they were slain for their failure. The others abided, and grew familiar with their unseen surroundings.

  Septimus’s thoughts went deeper than most. All machines had souls. This he knew, even from his days of loyalty to the Golden Throne. He would speak with the nothingness sometimes, knowing the blackness was an entity unto itself, an expression of the ship’s sentience. To walk through the pitch-blackness that saturated the ship was to live within the vessel’s soul, to breathe in the palpable aura of the Covenant’s traitorous malevolence.

  The darkness never answered, but he took comfort in the vessel’s presence around him. As a child, he’d always feared the dark. That fear had never really left him, and knowing the silent, black corridors were not hostile was all that kept his mind together in the infinite night of his existence.

  He was also lonely. That was a difficult truth to admit, even to himself. Far easier to sit in the darkness, speaking to the ship, even knowing it would never answer. He had sometimes felt distant from the other slaves and servants aboard the vessel. Most had been in service to the Night Lords much longer than he had. They unnerved him. Many walked around with their eyes closed, navigating
the cold hallways of the ship by memory, by touch, and by other senses Septimus had no desire to understand.

  Once, in the silent weeks before another battle on another world, Septimus had asked what became of the six slaves before him. The master was in seclusion, away from his brothers, praying to the souls of his weapons and armour. He had looked at Septimus then, staring with eyes as black as the space between the stars.

  And he’d smiled. The master rarely did that. The blue veins visible under the master’s pale cheeks twisted like faint cracks in pristine marble.

  ‘Primus,’ he spoke softly – as he always did without his battle helm – but with a rich, deep resonance nevertheless, ‘was killed a long, long time ago. In battle.’

  ‘Did you try to save him, lord?’

  ‘No. I was not aware of his death. I was not on board the Covenant when it happened.’

  The slave wanted to ask if the master would have even tried to save his predecessor had the chance arisen, but in truth he feared he knew the answer already. ‘I see,’ Septimus said, licking his dry lips. ‘And the others?’

  ‘Tertius… changed. The warp changed him. I destroyed him when he was no longer himself.’

  This surprised Septimus. The master had told him before of the importance of servants that could resist the madness of the warp, remaining pure from the corruption of the Ruinous Powers.

  ‘He fell by your hand?’ Septimus asked.

  ‘He did. It was a mercy.’

  ‘I see. And the others?’

  ‘They aged. They died. All except for Secondus and Quintus.’

  ‘What of them?’

  ‘Quintus was slain by the Exalted.’

  Septimus’s blood ran cold at those words. He loathed the Exalted.

  ‘Why? What transgression was he guilty of?’

  ‘He broke no law. The Exalted killed him in a moment of fury. He vented his rage on the closest living being. Unfortunately for Quintus, it was him.’

  ‘And… what of Secondus?’

  ‘I will tell you of the second another time. Why do you ask about my former servants?’