Night Lords Omnibus Read online

  A million humans, one million souls in varying states of augmentation, worked in these hallowed underground tunnels. The air was fever-hot with smoke, shimmering with heat blur, and rancid with the metallic reek of incense and industry.

  Entire cave systems were given over to railroaded conveyor carriages, huge trains transporting resources, ammunition, servitors and machine parts from one colossal chamber to the other. The myriad chambers themselves reached hundreds of metres in height, each capable of housing a battle-ready Warlord-class Titan. The stone skin of this great lair was masked in machinework attached to the walls: consoles, sensor relays, gantries, elevators, storage loaders, promethium fuel tanks, and grand icons of the Mechanicus of Mars. Little remained of the original red stone that had once reached as far as – and indeed farther than – the mortal eye could see.

  A city of factories and forges hidden beneath the armoured skin of the world’s crust. A city founded to provide the Imperium of Man with invaluable god-machines to stride across distant battlefields in the crusades of a dying empire. A city that had prospered for almost two thousand years.

  The plains before the mountain range had fallen to the Warmaster after the previous day’s fighting. The Mechanicus’s last-breath attempt to deter the siege of Seventeen-Seventeen’s front gates had failed, and the evidence of that failure stretched from horizon to horizon. Troop bulk landers and Astartes Thunderhawks carried soldiers and warriors down from the void and from elsewhere on Crythe, massing on the plains in one unified horde. The bodies of slain skitarii and mortal fodder smothered the rest of the plain, punctuated by the occasional corpse of a downed Titan. The mortal dead bloated in the morning sun. The skitarii’s flesh-parts were already starting to stink and discolour. The fallen Titans crawled with ants – the Warmaster’s own tech-adepts recovering the slain god-machines for use on other worlds.

  Crythe Prime was well-chosen by the Warmaster not only for its resources, but because the majority of its Titan Legion was engaged in battle elsewhere in the segmentum. Not only could resources be harvested from Seventeen-Seventeen if it fell, but the Imperium would be denied yet another bastion of strength in the future.

  The great gates would not hold for long. Seventeen-Seventeen had grown too far beyond its original plans. The Avenue of Triumph leading into the main undercity now stood outside the protection of Site 017-017’s invincible void shields. The main gate was naught but adamantium and Mechanicus ingenuity; despite its strength, it would fall to massed fire within hours. Wide enough to allow three Titans marching out abreast, it was also wide enough to allow the Warmaster’s army within.

  Under siege, threatened with destruction, the hidden city called upon its chosen sons. The few that remained answered this call. They marched through their home caverns, immense shoulders bristling with city-crushing weaponry, beneath banners of a hundred past glories. At their heels, a million adepts, servitors and skitarii warriors braced to repel the invaders.

  The last sons of the Legio Maledictis had awoken, and Seventeen-Seventeen shook with their tread.

  Blackened stood ready on the deck. It was a howling, dark-armoured vulture, with its engines whining as they gushed heat-shimmer into the air. It breathed readiness, and the Astartes felt inspired just seeing it.

  First Claw marched in loose formation towards the lowered gang ramp, their armour as repaired as the handful of hours back on board the Covenant had allowed. Each suit of war-plate still bore a wealth of scars. Mercutian and Uzas, with no access to trained artificers, looked as though they had no right to walk away from the last battlefield. Pits, cracks, chips and cuts spoiled the surfaces of their ceramite plating.

  Mercutian had complained of his armour’s machine-spirit responding sluggishly. Small wonder, with the damage its skin had taken.

  As he marched, he cycled through sight modes, swearing softly over the vox.

  ‘My preysight is down.’ The words came out hesitantly, and for good reason.

  ‘Bad omen,’ Uzas chuckled. ‘Bad, bad omen.’

  ‘I do not hold any faith in omens,’ Adhemar said.

  ‘Strange then,’ Uzas replied, ‘that you serve in a squad led by a prophet.’

  ‘Uzas,’ Talos said, turning to face him.

  ‘What?’

  Talos said nothing. He didn’t move.

  ‘What?’ Uzas repeated. ‘No lecture?’

  Talos still said nothing, standing unmoving.

  ‘His life signs are… insane,’ Cyrion was watching his retinal displays. ‘Oh, hell. Xarl!’

  Talos half-turned, staggered, and fell on nerveless legs. Xarl caught him with a clash of battle armour.

  ‘What ails him?’ Mercutian asked.

  ‘Seven eyes open without warning,’ said Talos over the vox, ‘and the sons of the Angel fly with vengeance in their hearts.’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Cyrion said to Mercutian. ‘Septimus! You are needed here.’

  ‘The Angel’s sons seek the blade of gold, and justice for their brothers with blackened souls…’

  ‘Now, Septimus!’ Cyrion yelled.

  The Exalted turned its horned head to a mortal whose name he had never even tried to learn.

  ‘Launch status,’ he drawled.

  The officer straightened his outdated uniform as he checked his console displays. ‘Lord Malcharion’s pod reads as already down, master. All squads already engaged or en route to the surface… except First Claw.’

  The Exalted craned itself forward. Bone creaked and armour growled. ‘What?’

  ‘Confirming, master.’ The officer affixed his vox-mic to his collar. ‘This is the command deck. Report launch status, First Claw.’

  The Exalted, ever a student of fear in the human form, watched in perverse fascination as the officer’s face paled. The soft drumming of the mortal’s heart thumped a touch harder and faster. Bad news, then. News the mortal feared to share.

  ‘First Claw reports, master, that Lord Talos is incapacitated. He has suffered another… malady.’

  ‘Order them to leave him and proceed to the surface at once.’

  The officer relayed the order. As he listened, he managed to swallow on the third attempt.

  ‘Master…’

  ‘Speak.’

  ‘First Claw has refused the order.’

  ‘I see.’ The Exalted’s claws gripped the handrests of his exquisite throne. ‘And on what grounds do they refuse to prosecute the enemy in this holy war?’

  ‘Lord Cyrion said, master, that if you are so worried about the surface battle, you are free to borrow their Thunderhawk and take a look down there yourself.’

  The fact the officer relayed all of this without more than a minor tremor in his voice impressed the Exalted considerably. He valued competence above all.

  ‘Fine work… mortal. Inform First Claw their treachery has been noted.’

  The officer saluted and did exactly that. The response, from the Astartes known as Lord Xarl, was immediate and obscene. The mortal decided not to relay that part back to the Exalted.

  More voices buzzed in his ear. The Astartes of First Claw again.

  ‘Lord?’

  The Exalted turned, intrigued by the rising unease in the man’s voice.

  ‘Speak.’

  ‘Lord Cyrion wishes a direct link to you. It’s a most grave and urgent matter.’

  ‘Open it.’

  ‘Vandred,’ Cyrion’s voice echoed across the bridge. ‘Recall the claws from the surface immediately.’

  ‘And why would I do that, Brother Cyrion?’

  ‘Because we do not have three weeks before the Blood Angels arrive.’

  The Exalted tongued its lipless maw, feeling the veins under its cheeks ache in sharp pulses. ‘Your belligerence grows tiresome, First Claw. I will listen to this and this alone. Link me to Talos’s vox.’

  ‘…breaching the hull. I kill him. He recognises my sword as he dies…’

  The Exalted listened in silence for over a minute. Whe
n his next words came, they did so with savage reluctance.

  ‘Open a channel to the Vengeful Spirit. I must speak with the Warmaster.’

  Malcharion trudged through the cavernous chamber of the under-mountain citadel. The siege had been grinding on for over an hour, and although Malcharion’s forces from 10th Company were charged with entering as part of the second wave, the reforming resistance in the early caverns was punishing the Chaos advance.

  Flanking his hulking form, yet giving him respectful – and prudent – distance with which to fire his weapons, two Night Lord claws advanced, their bolters spitting into the disorganised ranks of the enemy.

  The resurrected warrior knew them by name, knew their individual suits of armour even through the scars earned in the many battles each of them had survived and suffered without him.

  Yet with the passion of battle-lust rendered cold in this immortal shell, he felt little connection to the brothers he once commanded as captain of the 10th.

  They fought because they still hated with a ferocity he no longer shared. They shrieked curses with a bitterness he no longer tasted.

  Dark thoughts, these. Dark thoughts that threatened his focus.

  The Dreadnought’s armoured feet, splay-clawed and ponderous, crushed bodies beneath his weight. The double-barrelled cannon that served as his right arm boomed over and over, ripping vicious gaps in the skitarii’s lines. On they came, drawn by the blasphemy of his existence, desiring nothing more than to end the unlife he suffered because of warped Mechanicum lore.

  Perhaps a part of him was tempted to let them succeed. A small part. A part that remained silent and dead while battle raged. This was not joy – war had never been joyous for the war-sage – but the immersion allowed him to focus elsewhere, to concentrate upon the external. Such focus diminished his awareness of his true form, husk-like and cold within the sarcophagus.

  A skitarii with four shrieking saw-blade limbs battered itself against the Dreadnought’s front. Malcharion clutched it from the ground, squeezing it with the unbreakable strength of his power fist. Lightning flared into life as the dying tech-guard’s blood spurted onto the electrified metal claw that crushed him. Malcharion fired his arm-mounted flamer unit, bathing the man in liquid flame, roasting the skitarii’s flesh-parts even as the soldier was crunched into death. This organic wreckage he threw into the soldiers before him, lamenting their lobotomised indifference to such magnificent slaughter. Blood of the Ruinous Ones, what a foul waste of the Legion’s talents this war was.

  ‘Malcharion,’ said a vox-voice.

  It was significant effort to tune into speaking within the vox-network instead of transmitting his voice to the speakers mounted within his armour. The battle raging in the caverns hardly helped.

  ‘It is I.’

  ‘It’s Cyrion.’

  His autocannon hammered shells into a towering skitarii – a champion or a captain, surely. The cyborged warrior fell into the teeming horde in pieces. The shouts of thousands of soldiers locked together rang around the arching cavern.

  ‘You are supposed to be here, are you not? You woke me to kill everything for you?’

  ‘Sir, you have to pull back from Seventeen-Seventeen. Lead the claws back to the Thunderhawks.’

  Ghost-pain travelled through him in an acidic rush. Malcharion – his true form – screamed within the coffin of sustaining fluids. He felt the silken play of ooze across his ravaged face. Psychostigmata bruised his corpse’s pale flesh.

  The skitarii drilling into the Dreadnought’s knee joint was pulped into a wet smear a moment later. Malcharion spun on his waist axis, power claw outstretched. Several other skitarii about to besiege his towering body flew back into their fellows, bones smashed to shards.

  ‘We are within the cave city,’ Malcharion boomed, his pain flooding his vox-voice. ‘We cannot retreat. The day will be ours.’

  ‘Talos is being wracked by another vision. He says the Imperial relief fleet isn’t weeks away. It’s barely even hours away. The Blood Angels are coming.’

  ‘What of Vandred?’

  ‘He has apprised the Warmaster, but will not recall our forces. Likewise, the Hunter’s Premonition has been ordered to keep its troops on the surface.’

  Malcharion panned his power claw in an arc before him, unleashing streams of fire from the mounted flamer. Next to him, in orderly formation with bolters and blades striking, two squads of 10th Company’s Night Lords advanced in his shadow.

  The Dreadnought halted. Slowly, he turned. Watching.

  Noise erupted around him. Noises previously unheard over the snarling of his own joints and the rage of his weapons. Solid shells clanked and clinked from his armour. Bizarre. Almost like rainfall.

  ‘The Black Legion and their mortal slaves are engaged alongside us. Are we to abandon them? The Soul Hunter’s second sight is not without flaw.’

  ‘Malcharion, my captain, what do you believe?’

  The Dreadnought’s power plant thrummed louder as Malcharion re-engaged the enemy, fist crushing, cannons firing. The speakers on his hull blared loud as he shouted in Nostraman.

  ‘Night Lords! Fall back! Back to the ships!’

  Aboard the Covenant, the Exalted watched blurry pict feeds of the surface battle. The creature cycled through views – the helm picters of each squad leader and image-finders mounted on the hulls of 10th Company’s tanks. Orbital imagery was worthless with the battle now taking place in the opening chambers of the Omnissiah’s Claw. It was left to this series of juddering, frenetic scenes out of necessity. It offended the Exalted’s tactician sensibilities.

  On its left stood Malek, on his right, Garadon.

  ‘Do you see this?’ The Exalted focused on the crimson view displayed by one Astartes’s vision lenses.

  ‘Yes, lord,’ both Atramentar warriors said.

  ‘Intriguing, is it not? Why would all of our squads be moving back through the Warmaster’s forces? One has to wonder.’

  ‘I can guess, lord,’ Garadon said. His fist clutched the haft of his double-handed hammer tighter.

  ‘Oh?’ The Exalted allowed a rare smile to split its face. ‘Indulge me, brother. Share your suspicions.’

  Garadon growled before speaking, as if dredging up enough bitterness to put into the words. ‘The prophet is making his move to usurp your leadership of the warband.’

  Malek shook his bullish helm. ‘Talos is incapacitated by his second sight. You are seeing conspiracies in guiltless corners, Garadon.’

  ‘None of us are blind to your support of him,’ Garadon replied. ‘Your ardent defence of his every failure.’

  ‘Brothers, brothers,’ the Exalted no longer smiled. ‘Peace. Watch. Listen. I suspect any moment now–’

  ‘Incoming message, my prince,’ the vox-officer called from his station.

  ‘Delicious timing,’ the Exalted breathed. ‘Put it through.’

  ‘This is Captain Halasker of the 3rd,’ crackled the bridge speakers. All present knew the name. Halasker, Brother-Captain of 3rd Company, commander of the Hunter’s Premonition.

  ‘I am the Exalted, lord of the 10th.’

  ‘Hail, Vandred.’

  ‘What do you wish, Halasker?’

  ‘Why are your squads falling back to the landing site? Blood of the Father, the war-sage is ordering a retreat of all VIII Legion forces. What the hell kind of game are you playing?’

  ‘I did not order the withdrawal. Malcharion is acting according to his own maddened will. The Warmaster has demanded we continue the war’s prosecution.’

  ‘You cannot control your own forces?’

  The Exalted breathed through its closed fangs. ‘Not when the war-sage is on the surface, acting as if he ruled the 10th.’

  ‘And why are you not on the surface, Vandred?’

  The edge of derision in Halasker’s voice rankled more than anything the Exalted had endured in a long, long time… until the other captain’s next words.

  ‘Vandred, where is th
e prophet? Malcharion and your claws are voxing news of a new prophecy. I must speak with the Soul Hunter.’

  ‘He is incapacitated,’ the Exalted managed. Its teeth were clenched so forcefully that one cracked like porcelain. ‘Our father’s ailment has befallen him once more.’

  ‘So it’s true?’

  ‘I did not sa–’

  ‘Fall back!’ Halasker cried to his squads over the vox. ‘Fall back with the war-sage!’

  The Exalted roared at the ceiling of the command deck, loud enough to send the mortal crew cowering.

  He opened his eyes. The sight of bright, proud armour faded from before him, replaced by the dark red of his visor display. Flickering, tiny runes streamed across his vision. His hearts slowed. He swallowed the coppery tang of blood in his mouth.

  Targeting reticules locked on familiar aspects of his own chamber. A quick glance at the digital chron reader in his lens display told him exactly how long he’d been lost to sense.

  It could have been worse.

  ‘Cyrion,’ he voxed, and the door to his chambers opened the moment he spoke.

  ‘Brother,’ Cyrion said. He was still in full war-plate.

  ‘Cy, the Throne’s forces are coming. The Marines Errant, the Flesh Tearers. The Blood Angels, first of all. They are almost here.’

  ‘You’ve been out three hours, Talos.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘The Exalted has called a war council.’ Cyrion moved away from the door, gesturing for him to follow. ‘The Blood Angels are already here.’

  XIX

  FOR THE LEGION

  The war room was being used for its intended purpose for the first time in decades.

  Banks of monitors and consoles stood active, attended by servitors – many of whom were reprogrammed by Tech-Priest Deltrian following their capture on the asteroid chunk of Nostramo. A huge occulus screen showed the open link to a similar chamber on the Hunter’s Premonition, though that room was far grander and larger than even this, the largest room on the Covenant of Blood. The battle-barge was built to carry three entire companies, whereas the strike cruiser housed only one.