Void Stalker Read online

  Cyrion nodded. ‘We were just as surprised as you, brother.’

  Talos let his gaze sweep across the rest of the bridge. ‘To your stations, all of you.’ The humans complied with salutes and murmurs of ‘Yes, lord’.

  It was Mercutian who broke the silence that followed. ‘We are here, Talos. What should we do now?’

  The prophet stared at a world that should have been long dead, purged of life ten thousand years before and abandoned by all who called it home. The Imperium of Man would never re-seed a cursed world, especially one beyond the holy rim of the Emperor’s beacon of light. Reaching this world under standard propulsion would take months from even the closest border planet.

  ‘Ready all Claws for planetfall.’

  Cyrion cleared his throat. Talos turned at the surprisingly human gesture. ‘You have missed much, brother. There is something that requires your attention before we become involved planetside. Something pertaining to Septimus and Octavia. We were unsure how to deal with it in your absence.’

  ‘I am listening,’ the prophet said. He wouldn’t admit how his blood ran cold at the mention of those names.

  ‘Go to her. See for yourself.’

  See for yourself. The words echoed in his mind, clinging with an unnerving tenacity, feeling somewhere between prophecy and memory.

  ‘Are you coming?’ he asked his brothers.

  Mercutian looked away. Xarl grunted a laugh.

  ‘No,’ Cyrion said. ‘You should do this alone.’

  He reached her chamber, appalled at the weakness in his own limbs. Fifty-five nights, almost two full months without the daily training rites, hadn’t been kind to him. Octavia’s servants lingered in the shadows around her door, hunchbacked royalty in the sunless alcoves.

  ‘Lord,’ they hissed through slits in their faces that were once lips. Their bloodstained bandages rustled as they shifted and lowered their weapons.

  ‘Move aside,’ Talos ordered them. They fled, as roaches flee a sudden light.

  One of them stood its ground. For a moment, he thought it was Hound, Octavia’s favoured attendant, but it was too slender. And Hound was months dead, slain in the ship’s capture, scarcely twenty metres from this very spot.

  ‘The mistress is weary,’ the figure said. Its voice was somehow clenched, as though it strained through closed teeth. It was also a soft voice, too light to be male. She raised a bandaged hand, as if she could possibly bar the warrior’s passage with a demand, let alone with her physical presence. The woman’s cloth-wrapped face revealed nothing of her appearance, but her stature suggested she was less devolved – at least physically – than most of the others. Bulky glare-goggles covered her eyes, their black oval lenses amusingly insectile, giving the impression of mutation where none was immediately apparent. A thin red beam projected from the goggles’ left edge, following the attendant’s gaze. She’d welded a red dot laser sight to her facewear – for what reason, Talos couldn’t begin to guess.

  ‘Then she and I have much in common,’ the prophet stated. ‘Move.’

  ‘She has no wish to be disturbed,’ the strained voice insisted, growing even less friendly. The other attendants were beginning to return now.

  ‘Your loyal defiance does your mistress credit, but we are now finished with this tedium.’ Talos tilted his head down at the female. He had no wish to pointlessly slay her. ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘You are someone seeking to enter against my mistress’s wishes.’

  ‘That is true. It is also true that I am master of this vessel, and your mistress is my slave.’

  The other attendants skulked back into the shadows, whispering the prophet’s name. Talos, Talos, Talos… like the hissing of rock vipers.

  ‘She is unwell,’ the bandaged female said. Fear crept into her voice now.

  ‘What is your name?’ Talos asked her.

  ‘Vularai,’ she replied. The warrior smiled, barely, behind his faceplate. Vularai was the Nostraman word for liar.

  ‘Amusing. I like you. Now move, before I begin to like you less.’

  The attendant moved back, and Talos caught the glint of metal beneath the woman’s ragged clothing.

  ‘Is that a gladius?’

  The figure froze. ‘Lord?’

  ‘Are you carrying a Legion gladius?’

  She drew the blade at her hip. For a Night Lord, the traditional gladius was a short stabbing weapon the length of a warrior’s forearm. In human hands, it became a sleek longsword. The swirling Nostraman runes etched into the dark iron were unmistakable.

  ‘That,’ said Talos, ‘is a Legion weapon.’

  ‘It was a gift, lord.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘From Lord Cyrion of First Claw. He said I needed a weapon.’

  ‘Can you use it with any skill?’

  The bandaged woman shrugged and said nothing.

  ‘And if I’d merely shoved you aside and entered, Vularai? What would you have done then?’

  He could hear the smile in her strained voice. ‘I’d have cut out your heart, my lord.’

  The chamber of navigation offered a little more illumination than the rest of the ship’s rooms and hallways, lit by the grainy, unhealthy half-light of almost thirty monitors linked to external pict-feeds. They cast their greyish glare across the rest of the wide chamber, bleaching the surface of the circular pool in the centre. The meaty reek of amniotic fluid was thick in the air.

  She wasn’t in the water. In the months since they’d taken the Echo of Damnation, even after half the ship had been scoured and purged clean with flame weapons, Octavia had vowed to only use the amniotic pool for warp flight, when she required her deepest connection to the ship’s machine-spirit. Talos, having seen Ezmarellda, the chamber’s previous prisoner, could understand all too well why the Navigator refused to spend too long in the nutrient-rich water.

  Mixed in with the chemical stink of the thin ooze were the usual smells of Octavia’s personal space: the tang of human sweat; the musty edge of her books and parchment scrolls; and the faint – not unpleasant – spice of the natural oil in her hair, even when recently washed.

  And something else. Something close to the scent of a woman’s monthly blood cycle, with the same rich piquancy. Close, but not quite.

  Talos walked around the edge of the pool, approaching the throne facing the bank of monitors. Each screen showed a variant view of the ship’s outer hull, and the cold void beyond. A few showed the grey face of the world they orbited, and its contrasting white rock moon.

  ‘Octavia.’

  She opened her eyes, looking up at him with the moment’s bleariness that follows sleep but precedes comprehension. Her dark hair was bound in its usual ponytail, hanging from the back of the silk bandana.

  ‘You’re awake,’ she said.

  ‘As are you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘though I’d rather not be.’ Her lips curved into a half-smile. ‘What did you dream?’

  ‘I can recall little of it.’ The warrior gestured to the world on the screens before her. ‘Do you know the name of this world?’

  She nodded. ‘Septimus told me. I don’t know why you’d want to return here.’

  Talos shook his head. ‘Neither do I. My memory is in fragments from even before I succumbed to the vision.’ He released his breath as a slow sigh. ‘Home. Our second home, at least. After Nostramo, there was Tsagualsa, the carrion world.’

  ‘It’s been colonised. A small population, so it’s a recent colonisation.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘So what will you do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Octavia shifted in her throne, still wrapped in her thin cloth blanket. ‘This chamber is always cold.’ She looked up at him, waiting for him to speak. When he said nothing, she filled the silence herself. �
�It was difficult to sail here. The Astronomican doesn’t shine this far from Terra, and the tides were blacker than black.’

  ‘May I ask what it was like?’

  The Navigator toyed with a stray lock of hair as she spoke. ‘The warp is dark here. Utterly dark. The colours are all black. Can you imagine a thousand shades of black, each darker than the last?’

  He shook his head. ‘You are asking me to envisage a concept alien to the material universe.’

  ‘It’s cold,’ she said, breaking eye contact. ‘How can a colour be cold? In the blackness, I could feel the usual disgusting presences: the shrieking of souls against the hull, and the distant cancers, swimming alone in the deep.’

  ‘Cancers?’

  ‘It is the only way I can describe them. Great, nameless entities of poison and pain. Malignant intelligences.’

  Talos nodded. ‘The souls of false gods, perhaps.’

  ‘Are they false if they’re real?’

  ‘I do not know,’ he confessed.

  She shivered. ‘Where we’ve sailed before, even away from the Astronomican… those places were still dimly lit by the Emperor’s beacon, no matter how far from it we sailed. You could see the shadows and shapes gliding through the tides. Daemons without form, swimming through liquid torment. Here, I can see nothing. It wasn’t about finding my way through the storm, the way I’ve been trained. This was a matter of tumbling forward into blindness, seeking the calmest paths, where the shrieking winds were lessened, even if only for a moment.’

  For a moment, he was struck by the similarity between her experiences and the sensation of falling into his own visions.

  ‘We are here,’ he said. ‘You did well.’

  ‘I felt something else, though. The faintest thing. These presences, warmer than the warp around them. Like eyes, watching me as I brought the ship closer.’

  ‘Should we be concerned?’

  Octavia shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It was one aspect of madness amongst a thousand others.’

  ‘We’ve arrived. That is what matters.’ Another silence threatened between them. This time, Talos broke it. ‘We had a fortress here, long ago. A castle of black stone and twisting spires. The primarch dreamed of it one night, and set hundreds of thousands of slaves to making it. It took almost twenty years.’

  He paused, and Octavia watched the passionless skull of his facemask, waiting for him to continue. Talos exhaled in a vox-growl.

  ‘The inner sanctum was called the Screaming Gallery. Have any of the others ever spoken of this before?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, never.’

  ‘The Screaming Gallery was a metaphor, of a kind. A god’s torment, expressed in blood and pain. The primarch wanted to reshape the external world to match the sin within his mind. The walls were flesh – humans moulded and crafted into the architecture, formed as much from sorcery as from ingenuity. The floors were carpeted in living faces, preserved by feeder-servitors.’

  He shook his head, the memory too strong to ever fade. ‘The screaming, Octavia. You have never heard such a sound. They never stopped screaming. The people in the walls, crying and reaching out. The faces on the floor, weeping and shrieking.’

  She forced a smile she didn’t feel. ‘That sounds like the warp.’

  He glanced at her, and grunted acknowledgement. ‘Forgive me. You know exactly what it sounds like.’

  She nodded, but didn’t say anything else.

  ‘The foulest thing was the way you’d become immune to the wailing chorus. Those of us who attended the primarch in his last decades of madness spent much of our time in the Screaming Gallery. The sound of all that pain became tolerable. Soon after, you found yourself enjoying it. It was easier to think when surrounded by sin. The torment first became meaningless, but afterwards, it became music.’

  The prophet fell silent for a moment. ‘That was what he wanted, of course. He wanted us to understand the Legion’s lesson, as he believed it to be.’

  Octavia shuffled again as Talos knelt by her throne. ‘I see no lesson in mindless brutality,’ she said.

  He unlocked his collar seals with a breath of air pressure, and removed his helm. She was struck, once again, by the thought that he’d have been handsome but for the cold eyes and the corpse-white skin. He was a statue, a scarred demigod of clean marble, dead-eyed, beautiful in his sterility, yet unlovely to look upon.

  ‘It was not mindless brutality,’ he said. ‘That was the lesson. The primarch knew that law and order – the twin foundations of civilisation – are only maintained through fear of punishment. Man is not a peaceful animal. It is a creature of war and strife. To force the beasts into civilisation, one must remind them that excruciation awaits those who harm the herd. For a time, we believed the Emperor wanted this of us. He wanted us to be the Angels of Death. And for a time, we were.’

  She blinked for the first time in almost a minute. In their many long discussions and reflections, he’d never spoken of this in such detail. ‘Go on,’ she pushed.

  ‘Some say he betrayed us. Once our use was complete, he turned against us. Others claim that we’d merely taken our self-appointed role too far, and had to be put down like animals ourselves, for slipping our leashes.’ He saw a question in her eyes and waved it away. ‘None of that is important. What matters is how it began, and how it ended.’

  ‘How did it begin?’

  ‘The Legion had taken immense casualties in the Great Crusade, in service to the Emperor. Most of these were Terran. They came from Terra, from the Emperor’s wars across humanity’s birth planet. But all of our reinforcements came from our home world, Nostramo. Decades had passed since the primarch last walked upon the world’s surface, and his lessons of law had long since died. The population slid back into lawless anarchy, with no fear of punishment from a distant Imperium. Do you understand how we were poisoning ourselves? We were repopulating the Legion with rapists and murderers, with children who were the blackest sinners before they’d even tasted adulthood. The primarch’s lessons meant nothing to them, meant nothing to most of the Eighth Legion at the end. They were slayers, raised to become demigods, with the galaxy as their prize to plunder. In wrathful desperation, the primarch burned our home world. He destroyed it, breaking it apart from orbit with the firepower of the entire Legion fleet.’

  Talos breathed, low and slow. ‘It took hours, Octavia. All the while, we remained aboard our ships, listening to vox-calls from the surface, sending their screams and pleas up to us in the heavens. We never answered. Not even once. We stayed in space and watched our own cities burn. At the very end, we watched the planet heaving, breaking apart beneath the fleet’s rage. Only then did we turn away. Nostramo disintegrated into the void. I have never seen anything like it again. I know, in my heart, I never will.’

  A moment of foolishness almost made her reach a hand to touch his cheek. She knew better than to give in to that instinct. Still, the way he spoke, the look in his black eyes – he was a child, grown into a god’s body without a man’s comprehension of humanity. No wonder these creatures were so dangerous. Their stunted psyches worked on levels no human could quite comprehend: simplistic and passionate one moment, complex and inhuman the next.

  ‘It didn’t work,’ he continued. ‘The Legion was poisoned by then. You know that Xarl and I grew up together, murderers even as children. We joined the Legion late, when Nostramo’s venom was already rich in the Legion’s veins. And believe me when I say that where he and I grew up, among the street wars and the cheapness of human life, it was one of the more civilised regions of Nostramo’s inner cities. Much of the planet was in the throes of devolution, lost to urban wastelands and scavenger armies. As the strongest candidates, they were usually the ones chosen for implantation and ascension to the Eighth. They were the ones to become legionaries.’

  Talos finished with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
‘By then, it was too late. Primarch Curze was in the throes of degeneration himself. He hated himself, he hated his life, and he hated his Legion. All he craved was one last chance to be right, to show that he’d not wasted his entire existence. The rebellion against the Emperor – that war of myth that you call the Horus Heresy – was over. We’d turned against the Imperium that sought to punish us, and we’d lost. So we ran. We ran to Tsagualsa, a world outside the Imperium’s borders, away from Terra’s Beacon of Light that he claimed still stung his eyes.’

  He gestured at the grey world. ‘We ran here, and here is where it ended.’

  Octavia’s breath left her lips as mist. ‘You fled a war you lost and constructed a castle of torture chambers. How noble of you, Talos. I still see no lesson in it.’

  He nodded to that, conceding the point. ‘You have to understand that by the end, the primarch was riddled through by madness. He cared nothing for the Long War, wanting nothing beyond bleeding the Imperium and vindicating his life’s path. He knew he was going to die, Octavia. He wanted to be right when he died.’

  ‘Septimus told me of this,’ she said. ‘But raiding the Imperium’s edges for couple of centuries at the behest of a madman, and slaughtering entire worlds, is hardly a lesson of worthy ideals.’

  Talos watched her with his soulless eyes unwavering. ‘In that light, perhaps not. But humanity has to know fear, Navigator. Nothing else ensures compliance. By the very end, when the Screaming Gallery was the Legion’s war room and council chamber alike, the primarch’s degeneration had devoured him from within. He was rendered hollow by it. I still remember how regal he looked to us, how majestic our father was to our adoring eyes. But looking at him was like growing used to a disgusting smell. You could forget the foulness, just as you can ignore the scent, but when something reminds you of it, you perceive it with renewed strength. His soul had rotted away by the end, and on some nights you could see it in the flash of his dying eyes, or the bleak shine of his teeth. Some of my brothers asked if he were tainted by some outer power, but most of us no longer cared. What did it matter? The end result was the same.’