Konrad Curze the Night Haunter - Guy Haley Read online

  He smiled ferally at the corpse statue. Disappointed that there came no response to his goading, he rose slowly to his full, cadaverous height, and walked towards the throne, until he was right against it, his hands gripping the slimy wrists of the thing he had made.

  ‘Why should I not teach this lesson? You made me as your judge. It is my purpose. I am the weigher of souls. Do you wish to know, father, how I judge you?’

  He leaned so close to the effigy that his nose brushed the slippery meat of it.

  ‘Guilty,’ he whispered.

  He went to the lectern and took up his book, whereupon he began to speak briskly.

  ‘I have made my peace with all this blood and agony. None of it was my fault,’ he said. ‘As one cannot regret the diktats of fate, for one has no influence over it, then one cannot bear guilt. I torment myself no longer over my nature, for that too was beyond my control. However, there is one regret I harbour.’

  He bit his lip, hesitant to reveal his last secret. ‘If there is one thing I could change, then I would in an instant.’ He looked away from the silent statue, finding it easier to confess when not regarded by its bloody eye sockets. ‘When you came to me, and stood in all your glory, burning out the sight of my people so carelessly, I should have refused you. I should never have taken the name you forced upon me. For there is one lesson I have learned from all the horror of your reign, father, one small insight into myself, and that is this.

  ‘Night Haunter was just. He was a monster, that is true, but such is human nature. All we can hope for is better monsters to save us from the worst. His actions were bloody, but as a result his world was at peace with itself for the first time in millennia. It was only after I left Nostramo, and took up your burden, that my doom was sealed.’

  He smiled. If there had been anyone to see it, their heart would have shattered to see the pain that it expressed.

  ‘Father, father, father,’ he said. A single tear ran down his cheek. By its progress, a little of his lost majesty was restored. The patina of corruption was rinsed away by grief. Through the grime and caked-on blood, pure white skin, forged by artful gene craft, shone in the tear’s track. ‘Had I my time again, and freedom from fate’s chains to act, I would never have become Konrad Curze. Konrad Curze was a betrayer. An unbeliever. A lunatic, but worst of all, father, Konrad Curze was weak. Night Haunter was strong.’ He gripped his book tightly. ‘And in this benighted hell you have wrought, weakness is the greatest crime of all.’

  Unburdened of this last confession, Curze shut his eyes, and exposed his black teeth in a radiant smile. He looked heavenwards, as a prisoner released from incarceration might turn his face up to the sun.

  His catharsis didn’t last. No amount of self-loathing was enough for Curze. The more he spoke of his failings, the more he fuelled his need for absolution. Talking wore the grooves of obsession ever deeper. Words could never erase his sins. Not his, not those of his sons, and not those of his father.

  A sense of pressure building before a storm pressed the air in the room to an uncomfortable thickness. From out of this rolled a thunder of words that Curze had yearned for, yet in the last sane pockets of his mind had never expected.

  +You are not weak, my son.+

  The voice drove Curze to his knees with its power. His head rang with sudden, white pain. A roaring hurricane of might blasted from the figure, now surrounded with actinic light, tossing the remains of his last victims around, and burning out the wall, exposing Curze to the light of the hateful stars.

  ‘Father?’ he said. His voice was fractured, small, a child’s voice. Pitiful.

  +I am beyond your accusations. Beyond speech. Beyond anything. Why do you think that I speak? Your madness is finally complete.+

  Again the words rang Curze’s skull with the force of a clapper striking a bell. Still he managed to grin and raise his head to stare at the meat-thing’s glory, though he was forced to squint against the blazing light.

  ‘No, no! You are here. I hear you. You have come to face my judgement, drawn by this offering I have made. You ever were a bloody god.’

  +I am no god, nor shall ever be.+

  Curze got back up, his feathered cloak whipping in the psychic gale, his book clutched protectively to his chest.

  ‘You are here. You understand your guilt. You have come to face my judgement.’

  +You cannot condemn me. I am punished enough.+

  ‘There is not enough punishment for what you have done! Not in this life, or in the next,’ shouted Curze.

  +How dare you presume to understand what I have done, and what sacrifices I have made, and what I now must suffer?+ The force of the voice battered Curze back. +You will never know the depths of my pain, for which I am grateful.+

  Curze opened his eyes to peer sidelong at the figure. ‘Why such hollow words?’

  The voice took a moment before it returned, again with thunderous force that made Curze howl.

  +No father wishes his sons to suffer, no matter what burdens he is forced to place upon them.+

  Curze laughed. ‘An apology? What next, you will forgive me? Sanguinius warned me you might,’ he scoffed.

  +There was never anything to forgive. You acted as you were made to, but my plan was interfered with. Your insanity was not your fault, nor was it mine.+

  Curze snarled like an animal.

  ‘Lies! Everything was as you intended!’

  +There is nothing you have done wrong. If only you and I could have met one more time, I could have shown you back to the light.+

  ‘How marvellous!’ Curze fell into a minute of wild, howling laughter. ‘I am the Night Haunter! Light is anathema to me!’

  +Light is within you all. You are my sons. You are born of light. None of you are beyond redemption.+

  ‘Tell that to those who died.’

  +Nothing ever dies. Death is a state of transition. You have my forgiveness, Konrad, whether you want it or not.+

  ‘Never!’

  The voice in his head would not relent, but pounded mercilessly on. More masonry fell from the outside wall. The floor collapsed behind him, frittering into its constituent atoms.

  +You made but one mistake, my son. From it, all the evil you have perpetrated springs. You chose to believe in immutable fate. Without choice, there is nothing. These gods that taunt us rely upon choice. The functioning of this universe depends upon choice. A single fate is one book in a library of illimitable futures. You read only one. Do you not see that you chose this? You chose to be fate’s prisoner. Had you believed in your own agency, none of this would have come to pass. You made this happen. You chose to be the way you are, trapped, manipulated. Insane.+

  Curze’s smile froze, seeming to become detached from the face that wore it, hovering menacingly about his lips as a thing unique to itself, before it collapsed with all the violence of a dying star, and his mouth became a screaming hole.

  ‘No! You sent the Assassins to kill me. You want me dead!’

  +You determined what fate you trod. Your belief, my son, is nothing but an excuse for your own failings.+

  ‘No!’

  Wailing, Curze threw aside his book and hurled himself into the dreadful light, though it burned his eyes, and beat at the effigy, rending and tearing at it with his broken black nails, peeling long curls of frozen flesh from the stitched carcasses, ripping it to bloody shreds.

  The light went out.

  Shaking, sobbing, he collapsed to the floor. The last remnants of his sculpture rolled wetly from the throne.

  ‘I cannot be forgiven,’ he whispered. Tears coursed down his face, dripping from his nose and chin, insufficient in their profusion to dilute the blood spilled upon the floor. ‘After all I have done, where would be the justice in that? I had no choice! I had no choice!’

  The pressure dissipated. Curze hunched down to the floor and wrapped his arms around the ruin of his substitute father. Frozen in a half embrace, he waited for a voice that he would never hear again.r />
  Time proceeded towards the inevitable hour. Konrad Curze stirred himself. He lifted his head, as heavy as millstones on his neck, to look up at the idol of flesh. It had not moved, nor had the bloody chamber changed. All was as it had been before. Only his sorrow had altered, for the worse.

  Sighing, mustering all the shreds of his ruined sanity, he retrieved his discarded book and stepped over the smeared remains of his slaves to the door. He opened it, and passed through without a backward look.

  The door swung closed behind him with soft click. Adhered to the wall was a phosphex device primed to detonate the moment the door was opened again. This last gift would burn the room and all within it, and dissuade his hated sons should they be tempted to delve into his secrets, for many of them were sorcerers now, and for the likes of them the past could easily be scried in such morbid places. There was a version of events he preferred, and he clutched it to his chest: his memoir, The Dark, written in blood and sorrow in his own crabbed hand, including the events in the chamber as he had foreseen them. For so valued a tome, he discarded it carelessly, putting it in a high alcove behind a statue to be discovered, or not, as fate decreed. Free of the weight of its revelations, he walked taller, and reassumed some of his lost glory.

  The ways of his private halls were empty, cold and silent. Human life was absent, though death was everywhere. Bones and teeth made complex patterns on the floor. Flags of man hide hung leathery against the walls, and dotted about were mouldering corpses, the victims of Curze’s casual violence. The lucky few were whole, murdered quickly; the majority were horrendously mutilated.

  Solemnly, Curze passed into his arming chambers, where sombre, tongueless slaves awaited him. Coming among the living again provoked his anger. An urge to slaughter them all gripped his black heart, but he resisted, and went into their midst, where he held out his arms in readiness for their attentions in a studied sham of calm.

  They were not fooled, and went to work quickly.

  His weapons and armour were copies. Though his artisans’ finest work, they were mediocre compared to the originals. The power claws Mercy and Forgiveness, along with the Nightmare Mantle and his widowmakers, had been taken from him by his brothers. The weapons and armour in the chamber looked identical to his legendary gear, but they were not the same. Curze curled his hands within his gauntlets thoughtfully as his armour was bolted in place. Once he had been clad in plate that had few betters; now he was reduced to forgeries.

  ‘So many metaphors litter my life,’ he whispered. He was impatient so close to the end, eager to have it all done with.

  His serfs wisely ignored his words but went about their work with the rare focus of men whose lives hang upon the skilfulness of their actions.

  The last bolt whirred home. His cloak was replaced around his armoured shoulders. Tattered feathers took on some of the armour’s resplendency, shining blue-black as the night. The armour was not what it appeared, but it looked the part.

  Curze himself was immune to reflected glory. Within his ceramite shell, he remained as pale and filthy as a corpse stripped of wealth and abandoned in the dirt.

  From the arming chamber he passed into more populous areas, where his sons waited for him. The Legion was greatly reduced from the height of its strength. Unaltered human slaves outnumbered his sons many times over, but that night the Night Lords remembered their days of greatness. The serfs were absent from the primarch’s path and only legionaries crowded the halls.

  His sons loitered in the corridors as he passed. A few called out, the rest observed his wishes and remained silent. None tried to arrest his progress, or convince him to turn back. He saw flashes of their futures, all bleak and full of pain. They were so arrogant, so sure that they trod the righteous path, when they had been nothing but murderers all along. The first seeds of corruption were sown by their births. Their deaths to come were the bitter harvest of ineluctability.

  Take, for example, his command that none stop the Assassin coming for him that night. The order would be obeyed. The Night Lords would withdraw to allow the killer access to him. M’Shen would find the hallways empty. A minority did so because they understood his purpose, that the lesson be given in all its awful finality. Many of the rest dared not act against his wishes, for fear of losing their own lives should they defy their gene-father, either to his blades should they succeed, or to the Assassin in the attempt. A substantial number simply did not care, hating him as much as he hated them.

  His second order, that vengeance not be sought, would be disobeyed, but only one from all the thousands would do so for honest reasons – the rest would be motivated by greed for his relics. He saw it all clearly, right then, in his mind’s eye. So be it. Fate could not be cheated.

  He doubted that, even now. The voice in the chamber only spoke his own fears aloud, he knew that; he knew it wasn’t the Emperor, as much as he knew it was. Conflicting thoughts of equal torment, inimical to each other, coexisted painfully in his mind.

  I am free.

  I am not free.

  I am free.

  I am not free.

  ‘Stop it!’ he hissed to himself, losing for a moment his regal posture and becoming again the hunched beast. His warriors looked silently at him, and what had been a feeling of delicious vindication turned sour.

  He rallied himself, and began again his slow progress.

  Very well: if fate were not locked in iron, he willingly chose this death. Let this act be his and his alone, when so much of his life had been beyond his control.

  The levels around his throne room were deserted, as he had decreed. He opened the doors to the Screaming Gallery himself. The souls within were among the few who behaved consistently, howling out their sweet music of suffering on this night of nights like they did on every other. Hundreds of luckless mortals were imprisoned in its walls, floor and ceiling, their flesh stitched together, kept alive by science blended with unclean magic. Every one of them was conscious. Every one of them in pain. Their eyes rolled madly in stretched faces. Skins of many colours lent the walls a mottled appearance. Lords and peons screamed side by side, contorted into forced intimacy by their broken, tessellated limbs.

  All were equal in their suffering.

  Curze strode slowly down the hall, enjoying the screaming for the final time. His armoured boots sank into the giving carpet of flesh, breaking noses, bursting eyeballs, and leaving bruised footprints where his tread pressed.

  Too soon, too quick, the doors to the throne room were under his fingertips. These too he must open himself. No being with any will or freedom was abroad in that part of his palace. He had forbidden them all, mighty and meek, for he could not trust them.

  Before he pushed the doors open, he turned to the Screaming Gallery and addressed his victims.

  ‘I thank you for your music,’ he said in all sincerity. ‘I thank you for your pain.’

  He closed the doors behind him, shutting out the misery in favour of silence.

  His throne awaited him. He walked with majestic purpose to his seat, and took it. His personal effects had been laid out as he dictated. From a cushion he raised the corona nox and set it upon his head, and took up the other badges of his office, cradling them like the mummified god-kings of Terra’s distant past. In pride of place, at a table by his side, sat the battered deck of cards he had consulted so many times. He meant their presence to be his last comment on fortune’s cruel grip. But the cards dragged at his attention, forcing him to reappraise them as a tool of his delusion.

  He made himself stare rigidly at the doors, his posture that of the martyr in waiting. From leering gargoyles and carved representations of the worst torments, tiny lenses watched. These final moments would be recorded, and remembered for ten thousand years, as they must.

  Still as the statuary around him, he watched the entrance, the black pools of his eyes blinking rarely. He was already a king entombed. Now he must only wait for death.

  His last words were ready in hi
s mind, finally to be released onto his tongue, and thence into the world, and history’s pages. They had been there since the very beginning, waiting for this moment, the culmination of his wicked life foreseen. They would be said. Their time was now.

  Fate demanded it.

  The last moments of his life approached. Curze fancied he heard the grains of time run out.

  The door opened, and death stepped within.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Titandeath, Wolfsbane and Pharos, the Primarchs novels Corax: Lord of Shadows, Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia, and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dark Imperium, Dark Imperium: Plague War, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

  An extract from The Buried Dagger.

  The Reaper of Men had grown weary of the screaming.

  The cries from a million throats, the ceaseless cacophony of it, now fatigued him. He had long since become jaded with the pleas of those he killed, be they babbling streams of words as the doomed begged for pity, the foolish and furious curses of the fatally enraged or the endless, irritating wail of those who wept brokenly.

  There was, at least, a small mercy to be had here on the surface of Ynyx. The monstrously poisonous atmosphere of the manufactory planet meant that every soul who toiled upon the world had no mouth with which to cry out. From the instant of their birth, the machines of the magos biologis sealed shut the apertures upon the faces of the human populace, organo-printing protective membrane masks over lips and nostrils. The workers were implanted with grilles and nutrient intakes, along with countless chem shunts and protective grafts, these enhancements and alterations sufficient to make them immune to the toxic fog that belched continuously from the core of the mineral-rich world. The people of Ynyx could only communicate via vox transmission, their voices muted in all other senses, and so it was that the Reaper of Men could walk in silence among them if he simply tuned them out.