Konrad Curze the Night Haunter - Guy Haley Read online

  ‘You are not the one,’ said the monster. ‘You are not the one who will slay me. Now is not my time. The lesson is yet to be given!’

  ‘Why are the worst villains always the most talkative?’ said Gun, loosing off a four burst shot from his weaponry.

  ‘How irritatingly trite,’ said Curze, evading Gun’s shots. ‘I was raised on a world of murderous poets. This tongue of yours is lacking in beauty, so emblematic of all touched by my father.’

  Curze leapt, a stretching shadow that moved a distance just within the bounds of possibility. Gun struggled to dodge, weaving under Curze’s outstretched talons. He could not avoid the next strike.

  Their battle came to a crashing end. Curze jabbed with his left hand, ramming his splayed fingers through Gun’s midriff. The polyplastek of the operative’s bodysuit split like grape skin, and black talons, preceded by a spray of arterial red, burst from his back. His stomach was utterly ruined. Only his spine held the two halves of his body together, only Curze’s palm, cupped in Gun’s innards, held his guts in place.

  Curze lifted Gun up to his face. The operative’s attempts to speak resulted in a wet gurgle and a cataract of dark blood pouring from his mouth. One of his pistols fell from a limp hand. The other he tried to raise and fire, but he managed to lift it only a short way before it, too, fell.

  ‘Vindication,’ said the Night Haunter. ‘That will be the subject of my final words, but they will not be spoken, not yet, and not to you. I tell you for your comfort and to emphasise, after all your long training and servitude to my father, there will be no vindication for you.’

  Curze turned his right hand thumb down, wrapped his massive fingers around Gun’s left shoulder, and with a twisting shove, tore the operative in half. Gun’s legs dropped upon a rope of glistening intestine. The upper torso thumped down, head lolling, Gun’s final expression was one of unprofessional surprise. Curze shook viscera from his hands, and looked directly at Elver.

  ‘You, pathetic mortal,’ Curze hissed. ‘You may come down here, and I will not slay you, or you may run, so I can hunt you down and you may experience a death of terrible, prolonged agonies. I am weary of hunting. Unlike this assassin’s slave, who would have killed you out of hand, I give you genuine choice.’

  Elver gaped at the blood soaked wraith, dithered, then fled.

  He got no more than a few metres before the primarch reared before him and swatted him down. His vision swam as Curze leaned forwards, filling his world with a moon pale face.

  ‘Why do you mortals always run?’ said Curze. A gust of rancid breath chased Elver into the black.

  It was the last Elver saw, for a while.

  Elver awoke chained to Overton’s command throne. The bridge was freezing, barely lit, the chilled metal of his restraints gnawing at his skin with blunt iron teeth. He shook uncontrollably. All parts of him were deathly cold but for a hot, angry throbbing in his left hand. He looked at it, afraid of what he might see, and was justified in being so, finding filthy bandages wrapped around the place his two smallest fingers should be. Blood, his own blood, was frozen to the throne arm in brilliant red icicles.

  That was too much. Pressure built deep in his gut, erupting from his throat in a shrill scream that would do credit to a dying animal. For a whole minute he screamed, thrashing against the chains vainly until, shaking and breathless, he calmed, and forced himself to stop his racket.

  ‘Breathe, Elver, breathe. You’re not dead yet,’ he whispered to himself.

  He forced his attention from his bonds and the dreadful wound, out past his feet. His eyes wouldn’t focus, until he bullied them into doing so. First things first. Was he alone? It appeared he was, apart from the frozen, dismembered remains of some of the crew frost-glued to the bridge floor, and the walls, and the ceiling, the equipment and…

  ‘Don’t look,’ he said. ‘Don’t look.’ He screwed his eyes tight and took deep breaths until his heart slowed to something approaching normal, and his chest ceased to shudder.

  He checked himself over. The chains on his wrists were long enough to allow him to pat himself down. Other than his missing fingers, he seemed whole, and compared to the appalling injuries on the bodies in the bridge with him, he supposed he should be thankful. Once he’d discovered all his other parts were where they should be, he tried to free himself again, only in a more focused manner than before, tugging at the chains and pulling himself forwards as far as he could. He found no give in his restraints, so he closed his eyes again and muttered out something close to a prayer. They said the Emperor protects. Now would be a fine time to find out that was true.

  ‘I hear some of the Emperor’s cattle are worshipping my father as a god,’ said a hissing, growling voice behind the throne. ‘How magnificently hilarious.’

  Elver didn’t want to look. His eyes disobeyed him, sliding around, pulling his head after them, then his shoulders, until he was craning his neck as far as he could. How he had not noticed the primarch in there with him was beyond belief. He was so huge, possessed of such presence, and the smell coming off him… Worse than death. Worse than the ship’s sumps and bilges. Elver’s brain rebelled against the sight of Curze, hunched in the dark, occupying far more space than even his inhuman bulk should fill. He was larger than the shadows and as big as the night. All Elver’s attempts to rally his spirits collapsed, and he cried out in terror.

  ‘Whimpering will help you as much as your half-formed prayers. I suggest you cease both,’ said the primarch. He came forwards, his shoulders scraping on the roof, his dirty hair swinging around the pale, pale face from which shone eyes as black as coal. ‘Do not annoy me, and you might live.’

  Elver’s head buzzed. Blackness nibbled at the edges of his vision. He fought against it. If he passed out, he would be killed. He knew that with horrifying certainty.

  ‘You, you don’t want to kill me?’

  The primarch shrugged. It was such a human gesture, that Elver’s perception shifted, and he saw Curze not as a monster, but as a monstrous man.

  ‘Wanting has nothing to do with it. We are puppets of time, you and I. For the moment you live.’

  He reached a long, wraith’s arm towards Elver, prompting another moan of fear. The blackness crowded in closer, tugging at his mind, his subconscious striving to save his conscious mind from terror the only way it knew how, by plunging him into ignorance.

  ‘I really wish you wouldn’t do that. I warned you not to be annoying. Your moaning is annoying. The smell of you is annoying. The dull, bovine intelligence gleaming in your eyes is annoying. Your lack of comprehension is annoying. I am a patient man.’ Curze giggled, and Elver thought it the most abhorrent noise he had ever heard. ‘Much more annoyance though, and I will no longer be so.’

  Curze’s arm was so long and thin it seemed to stretch into forever. Under the crusted gore it was white as corpse flesh soaked long in water. Blood had flaked from his hand, clinging on only in the creases, bringing alive a topography of palm lines and scars etched in stolen life. The hand went past Elver’s nose, and he smelled the iron tang of murder, but it did not come for him. Curze depressed a button on the command throne arm that looked much like any other – in his panic he could not recognise it. It summoned into being a cartolith before Elver’s seat, whose dizzy spin mirrored that within his skull.

  Curze rolled a tracking ball embedded in the throne arm near to Elver’s mutilated hand, slowing the cartolith to a stop.

  ‘I wish you to direct this vessel for me, to this place here.’

  Curze uncurled a long finger, thin and knobbly as a spider’s leg, and pointed at a dot of light in the cartolith. Elver realised his next words would dictate whether he lived a little longer, or died in indescribable pain right there and then. At this realisation, his brain fought off the comforting dark, and spooled up to work with amazing alacrity, taking in the pulsing icon indicating the Sheldroon’s crawl through space, and calculating the distance between their position and where the creature wis
hed to go faster than any astrogative sum he had ever performed before.

  Elver swallowed. Speaking without pissing himself at the same time was an immense, unwelcome effort.

  ‘It is…’

  Curze tilted his head.

  Elver stopped, and started again. ‘My lord,’ he managed, stronger now. ‘This craft is not warp capable. The place you indicate is three light years from our position.’

  ‘What is the speed capability of this vessel?’ asked the primarch.

  ‘Three quarters of light speed is the fastest it has ever gone, my lord,’ he said, robotic from long practice; the ship’s capabilities were among the first lessons Overton had given him upon arrival, and he was – had been – rightfully proud of its speed. ‘I am forced to ask your forgiveness, lord, and allow me some honesty, because I don’t know if that was Overton bragging or not. I have never seen the ship attain that velocity.’

  Curze bent, and wrenched something up from the floor with a crack of breaking ice.

  ‘Was this he, this Overton?’ Curze displayed a ruined head.

  ‘No, that was Graven,’ Elver said. ‘The helmsman.’ Then he added, ‘I think.’

  Curze tossed the head aside. It bounced off a console, bringing forth an angry bleep from the machines, before rolling on the floor with a noise like a wooden ball heading down a knock-pin alley.

  ‘If he was the helmsman, that means that you can’t sail this ship. What a pity for you.’

  Curze reached for him.

  ‘No! No! I can, my lord, please!’ he gabbled. ‘I can fly it, I was training as a helmsman, but I learned all the other systems as well. It was a small crew… We had to know everything!’

  ‘Oh. Good.’ Curze relaxed. Elver could not. ‘Four years to make my destination?’ The primarch stroked Elver’s thigh with a single, ragged nail. Elver was reminded of Overton doing the same thing before hitting him – at the time it was the worst feeling in the world. Until this.

  ‘No! No!’ he squealed. ‘Please, my lord. A ship like this doesn’t run with an active drive. You point it and accelerate, cut the engines when you’re at optimal speed, reverse and put them back on again to slow down when you get close to where you’re going. Getting there doesn’t take too long, it’s the acceleration and deceleration that eat into the time!’ he said, in one hurried breath.

  The nightmare cocked his head and folded his arms. Eyes blacker than any bird’s bored into Elver’s face, making him cringe. Black nailed fingers tapped on his biceps. Despite the impression of emaciation the primarch gave, his muscles were enormous.

  ‘I am aware of how void travel works, little man,’ said the creature. He gestured widely. ‘I was testing you. This is a crude craft. A fool could pilot it. I am seeing if you are fool enough to know how.’

  ‘You can fly this ship?’ said Elver.

  ‘I am one of the Emperor’s sons. I can do anything.’

  ‘Then you don’t need me,’ said Elver.

  ‘No,’ said Curze. ‘I do not. I need nobody, and nothing.’

  ‘Then why spare me, when you have killed every other living being on this vessel?’ Elver asked.

  ‘Call me sentimental, call me merciful,’ said Curze distractedly.

  Elver resolved never, ever to call Curze either of those things.

  ‘But it is, as you said, a long journey. I require company. Entertainment, or I should become bored.’

  Elver wanted anything else in the universe other than that thing becoming bored.

  ‘Will you do as I bid,’ Curze continued, ‘or do you wish to share the fate of your travelling companions here? I am sure you are not without guilt.’ His long black nails uncurled, gesturing at the ruined bodies. ‘Which sentence is it to be? There is only one.’

  ‘I will sail for you, lord. I will serve you!’

  ‘Good. Good.’ Exerting minimal effort, Curze broke Elver’s chains from the throne, but left them wrapped around his ankles, wrists and neck. ‘Get on with it then.’

  Curze hunched lower – not so much to avoid the human-height ceilings, but because it seemed the posture was comfortable to him. He hummed a jarringly jaunty tune as he headed for the door to the main spinal corridor, his hands idly patting at the walls.

  Elver blinked in disbelief. A slaughterhouse ship was his to command. His head spun. He half expected to wake, sweating in his bunk. He knew he never would. There was no escaping this nightmare.

  Accepting that calmed him. Somewhere, deep inside his heart, a little flame snuffed out. Hope dead, he was numb enough not to care.

  ‘My lord,’ he asked. ‘What happened to my hand?’

  Curze turned back and gave a grin that froze the blood in Elver’s veins. ‘I became bored.’

  NINE

  MURDER AMOK

  ‘Boredom,’ said Curze to his flesh sculpture, many years later, ‘is among the greatest of all human sins. It demands mischief to fill it, and mischief begets disorder. Boredom is pernicious, bringing forth wickedness in those who might remain guiltless. I do not know how much to blame boredom for what happened on Nostramo, but surely it must have played its part. All those powerful men and women, from families steeped in the darkness of lawlessness for so many centuries, all of them finding their talents underemployed.’

  He got up, his joints popping and cracking, warped out of true by the physical corruption unmaking the Emperor’s work, and prowled around the chamber.

  ‘I blame myself. If I had enacted a greater purge of Nostramo, removing those families of ancient sin from the populace, then perhaps compliance would never have broken down. I am not perfect, I make mistakes, as this universe has so cruelly taught me. Although the laws of fate do not allow a man to choose but a single course of action, it is a cruel enough master to grant us the imagination to envisage what otherwise might have been.’ He walked over to the lectern, and let his fingers trail over the soft cover of the book. ‘I can see if I had slaughtered them, and hung their lifeless bodies out in the rain, then Nostramo would have been a model world. But I trusted too much to human nature, as you made me to, as the universe dictated I do. I thought fear would be enough to keep them obedient. But arrogance, ambition, avarice, pride and – most of all – boredom can overcome fear in time. And it did.’

  The revolution came quietly, was over in moments, and went unremarked. A muffled report of an assassin’s bullet resulted in the final triumph of the old ways, and the Imperial Governor Hashellian Eikolo Balthius lying dead.

  A wisp of greasy smoke curled up from the body. Limbs crooked at angles impossible for a living being to hold, Balthius’ corpse stared at nothing, one eye bloodied with a haemorrhage, an expression of perfect shock on his face.

  ‘He wasn’t expecting that, sir,’ said Veyshan Tul.

  Count Ashkar Skraivok handed his gun to his attendant. Tul took the gun in a black silk cloth, wrapped it and discreetly stowed it away in a bag. Just as deftly, he produced a second, identical cloth for his master to wipe his hands on.

  ‘Wasn’t expecting to be smashed in the face with a pistol butt, or shot, Tul?’ asked Ashkar.

  He was a count solely by dint of family tradition. The Skraivoks assumed the title centuries ago to cloak their criminal activities in respectability, so long ago now it had become true, but traces of their lowly origins lingered. In Ashkar Skraivok they were pronounced. His hands were not those of an aristocrat. They were broad, scarred, with thick, strong fingers used to doing their own bloody work. Skraivok did not like to delegate, especially not something so momentous and so pleasurable as shooting the governor.

  Tul smirked at the crime lord. ‘Both, I should say, sir.’

  Skraivok toed the body with a foot that was as broad and powerful as his hands. ‘He was blind. If he were less of a fool, he would have seen that coming.’

  Skraivok took his jacket from Tul, and shrugged it on, spending some time fiddling with the lapels. The effort was wasted. Though the jacket was finely tailored, it could do nothin
g to refine Skraivok’s apish build. In it, he looked exactly what he was, a criminal lord with adopted airs, and not the gentleman he purported to be.

  ‘Times are changing, Tul, back to the way they were in my great-great-grandfather’s time.’ The doors opened onto the finely appointed corridors of the Melanchromatic Palace. The guards in their smart government uniforms were also dead, their life already soaking away into the carpet. House Skraivok’s men – equally well uniformed, for they were an army in their own right – stood guard all around the building, ready for trouble. Skraivok snorted at the idea of danger. He was trouble.

  He spared the governor’s corpse a final glance. ‘Clean that up, Tul,’ he ordered. ‘And call the council. Phase two begins.’

  Until a few hours before, the Sphericum had been the great chamber of the Nostraman government. Currently it played host to a different sort of parliament.

  A hundred and seven cartels were represented in the gathering. Some had but one spokesperson, others sent armed parties dozens strong. Correlation between numbers and power was non-existent. A couple of the greater organisations had the smallest parties, some of the weakest the largest. Nothing was ever straightforward on Nostramo.

  The Sphericum rested upon a spire shoulder of Nostramo Tertius, at the very edge of the city. A single, seamless window curved around the sphere, in a shape that evoked the waves of the midnight sea the Sphericum overlooked. The edges were broken up artistically into smaller, abstract shapes to represent foam, and small seabirds of glass dipped over the tallest peaks. On the opaque parts of the dome a huge mural told Nostramo’s history, commencing with stylised colony vessels piercing the clouds, incorporating ancient lion hunts, the beauty of dark mountains, the horrors of strife, and the raising of the hives. The world’s less than savoury past was overlooked in this triumphal art – ironic, thought Skraivok, looking at the assemblage of family heads in the chamber. There was not an honest man or woman in the room, but nor had there been when the Council of Nine held sway.