The Omnibus - John French Read online

  Haakon came over the top of the ridge in a leaping bound. For a paused heartbeat the scene was still beneath him: ten figures in a loose circle, silver masks in the shapes of reptile beasts glinting with polished light. At their centre a figure, hunched under a cloak of tanned skin. He could see the patterns of angular tattoos ripple across the cloak as a breeze caught its edge.

  Then Haakon landed. Some of the guards turned and raised weapons. Some scattered. Two became crushed flesh beneath his boots. Haakon’s first axe-cut was lateral, from left to right, backhanded, his muscles uncoiling into the movement. Blood scattered through the air. Gunfire rang against his armour. He spun and cut down, opening a man from bronze collar to groin. Wet liquid sprayed Haakon’s face. He was not seeing what he was killing, not really. Each enemy was a brief blur of movement: an impression of dented armour, a face hidden by a beast mask, a lasweapon worked in bronze. The axe split a skull and pulped the meat inside. At his feet the blood was melting the chemical ice. Fumes rose around him. The stink of ruptured intestines coiled amidst the thickening fog. He cut again.

  Something smacked into his right cheek. He felt his flesh burning, and then nothing, as his body numbed the injury. The witch stood, a bronze-cased laspistol in her hand, its barrel levelled at him. Her skin hung in grey sags from her gaunt skull, and the cloak of flayed faces did not hide the twisted body beneath. The arm holding the pistol shook. Haakon looked into her eyes; they were the yellow of fat. Haakon snarled, and the wound in his cheek opened like a second mouth. The witch’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  Haakon’s foot slammed into her chest. The impact shattered her ribs and spun her through the air. The axe severed her neck as she fell back to the ground. Haakon paused, slow breaths sucking between his canines. Hacked meat and slick offal lay around him, heaped in piles, steaming into the cold air. His armour glistened, scarred grey hidden beneath crimson. For a moment his mind was free of the fatigue that had consumed him body and soul. For a moment he felt joy. Then the feeling drained from him, and the needs of the hunt returned like the ache of tired muscles. He must take what he came for now, before the dead flesh cooled.

  He bent down and picked the witch’s head from the ground. Lank hair tangled in his fingers as he held it level with his own face. He closed his hand. The skull held its shape for a second, and then it cracked like an egg. Yellow sores and clotted black fluid riddled the flesh within. He brought the bloody mass to his teeth and bit down. The flesh was warm and tasted of memories. Impressions, ghost sensations and broken words filled his mind with every bite. He ate until the skull was an empty shell, and he had what he needed.

  His skin prickled as he dropped the skull. There was someone behind him.

  His axe was a razor blur as he turned.

  ‘It is I, brother,’ growled a voice.

  Haakon held his blow, but did not lower the axe. A lone figure stood a blade-swing from his shoulder. It looked back at him with familiar blue eyes. Serpentine marks of aversion crawled across the figure’s grey armour, and thick rows of sharp teeth hung from the red pauldrons. In places the serpentine marks glowed with a pale light. Haakon knew the voice and the face that spoke. He knew that he should lower the axe, but part of him wanted to swing and watch the blood flow fresh into the snow.

  ‘Haakon,’ said the figure in grey. ‘Lower your weapon.’

  Haakon did not lower the axe.

  ‘Oulf?’ said Haakon slowly. The name was thick on his tongue, as if the numbness of the hole in his cheek had spread to his jaw.

  ‘It is I,’ said the figure. Haakon shifted his grip on his axe.

  ‘You died on the world of sand and thirst,’ said Haakon.

  ‘No, brother,’ said the figure. ‘The kill has taken your mind. I did not die. Remember.’ Haakon’s gaze wavered, and he shook his head as if flies were buzzing over his skin. Oulf was dead; Haakon could remember the rune priest’s blood soaking into the white sand. But here he was standing alive before him…

  ‘No,’ said Haakon, swaying as he spoke. The witch’s blood memories still filled his head, clotting his thoughts with fading images. Perhaps Oulf was not dead? Perhaps that had been a dream. Perhaps the warp was taking his memory.

  The figure that looked and spoke like Oulf moved past Haakon and picked up the witch’s empty skull.

  ‘What did she know?’ said the figure, looking into the witch’s lifeless eyes, and then to Haakon. ‘Did she know where to find the exile?’

  Haakon closed his eyes. The wound on his cheek had begun to burn with pain. His head ached in dull throbs.

  ‘Haakon,’ said the figure carefully. ‘What did she know?’

  ‘She met him,’ said Haakon. His eyes were stinging and the words were heavy as they came from his mouth. ‘But she did not realise who he was. He was part of a warband…’ He breathed, trying to steady himself. The witch’s memory was fading in his mind: a glance across a battlefield, a chance glance back, a pair of sky-blue eyes.

  ‘What warband?’ asked the figure, and stepped closer. Haakon shook his head again. ‘Brother, what warband? Where did she see him?’

  Haakon’s eyes snapped open, and his hand gripped the haft of his axe.

  ‘You died,’ he said softly. ‘You died long ago, and I am alone.’ The axe came up fast, slicing at the figure that wore the face of Oulf. The figure stepped back faster than anything should move. Haakon cut again and the axe sliced into its chest. Smoke and black blood spilled from the cut. He could suddenly smell ash and burned flesh. The figure went down into a foetal crouch, and Haakon brought the axe around for a kill-stroke.

  The figure’s face snapped upwards. A third eye burned red in the middle of its forehead. Haakon felt the air leave his lungs. He was burning from the inside. The ice, blood and sky were vanishing at the edge of his sight. He raised the axe but it was not there; there was just dust in his hand, and a sensation of falling. A wind was spiralling around him, and the world was dissolving into grains of dust.

  Pain filled Haakon’s skull. The figure in front of him no longer looked like Oulf; it was an outline of black-edged fire. Two points of green light burned where its eyes had been. Haakon stepped forwards, a howl of rage and hate ripping from between his teeth. His hands dissolved into the cyclone wind as he reached for the figure’s eyes. Pain stabbed into his head again, and exploded in white brilliance inside his skull.

  Haakon opened his eyes. He was still howling, the sound echoing around the chamber’s crystal-covered walls. He was lying on a stone table, angled so that his head was higher than his feet. Chains held him at the wrist, throat and ankle. His armour was gone, and spiralling marks in blue ink covered his skin. Gore and bile ran down his chin and chest in thick rivulets.

  ‘You will tell me what you learned from the witch.’ A figure walked into view. Its skin was golden, its eyes green without white or pupil. Silver scarabs, birds and jackal-headed half-men crawled across the red lacquer of its armour. Strips of closely written parchment fluttered from the pauldrons as it stepped forwards, a black glass knife in its hand. Behind it two suits of armour stood immobile, their eyes shining with ghost light from high-crested helms.

  A sorcerer, thought Haakon. His muscles bunched against the restraints. The sorcerer looked down at Haakon and shook his head. ‘You will tell me,’ said the sorcerer, and Haakon felt the soft words shake his thoughts. He stared back and spat. The acid in the blood-laced phlegm sizzled on the sorcerer’s chestplate.

  ‘You cannot stop us,’ growled Haakon. ‘My brothers will find him and then we will come for the rest of you. We will hunt you until you tire, and when you are weak we will split you open and feed your hearts to the crows.’ Haakon was breathing heavily, his muscles straining against the chains.

  The sorcerer shook his head as if in sympathy.

  ‘You will not find him, wolf. Nor will any of your breed.’ The sorcerer paused, looking at the point of the black glass dagger in his hand. ‘You will not find him because we will f
ind him first. We who were his brothers will find him.’ He looked up from the dagger, and Haakon saw something in those blank green eyes that made him bare his fangs. ‘His fate is ours, not yours.’

  ‘You lie.’

  ‘I do not lie. Your prey is our prey, and the greater cause is ours. You dogs hate us all, but we, we Brothers of Dust, we were his brothers, his followers, his friends. He deceived us, destroyed us and forced us into exile.’ The sorcerer put the point of the dagger to Haakon’s throat. ‘You will give me what I need to find Ahriman. I will not allow you to deny me.’

  ‘The dark tides will swallow you, and the ice will freeze over your corpse,’ snarled Haakon, his muscles bunching against the point of the dagger. Blood welled up and trickled down his neck.

  ‘You are resistant to our craft, your kind always were. But I do not need to break your mind.’ The sorcerer shook his head slowly. ‘I must thank you for reminding me that there are other, less refined paths to knowledge.’

  Haakon’s pupils went wide and he roared as he realised what was going to happen. He was still roaring as the dagger punched into his neck. The sorcerer sawed the blade across Haakon’s throat just under the jaw. Blood ran in a red sheet over the stone table. Haakon kept roaring as the sorcerer reached into the grinning wound and pulled the soft white gland from his neck.

  For a second, the sorcerer looked at the blood-covered meat in his hand. The gland was a progenoid, the root of the genetic miracle that had created the Space Marines. They held blood memory more surely than a human’s brain. Slowly the sorcerer tipped his head back, opened his mouth and ate the gland. As they had for Haakon, memories unfolded in the sorcerer’s mind like blood tipped into clear water. For a moment he swayed. Then his mind found what it sought: the memory of another blood feast, of the warm flesh from the witch’s skull between Haakon’s jaws. The sorcerer’s mind reached out and grasped the memory as it formed.

  ‘Har…’ The sorcerer’s mouth struggled to form the word as it solidified in his mind. ‘Harrowing,’ he said, and spat a thick splatter of blood onto the floor. It was what he needed. It was a name, and names held power. With this name he could track its bearers through the aether, and that would take him a step closer to finding his quarry, his prey, as Haakon would have said. He would send word to his master and the rest of the Brotherhood of Dust. The trail of the exile was clear, and they moved a step closer to their end.

  On the stone table Haakon twitched, alive despite his slit throat. The sorcerer drew his sword, and looked into Haakon’s eyes.

  ‘Thank you, Haakon Grey Storm.’ He raised the sword above his head. ‘Our brotherhood thanks you,’ said the sorcerer, and brought the sword down on Haakon’s neck.

  PART ONE

  FATE’S EMISSARY

  I

  THE HARROWING

  Please don’t take her. I am weak, but please don’t take her from me.

  The deck shook beneath Carmenta’s feet as she hurried through the silence of the Titan Child.

  I am too weak, she thought. I deserve this, but please let me return to my child. The deck shook again. She stumbled, hit a bare metal wall and slid to the floor. Her polished brass hands shook as she tried to pull herself up. The deck bucked and sent her sprawling. She lay for a second, watching data scroll across her green-tinted vision: the Titan Child was taking damage. Half of the outer belly compartments were open to the void. Fires were burning along the spinal weapon decks. Had she been on the bridge, linked to the ship, she would have felt each injury as if it were to her own body. Instead she watched the Titan Child’s pain in a screed of impersonal data. Even then, she felt a ghost of pain in her torso as she assimilated the information.

  She is bleeding, and alone. For a second she thought she felt tears run from her eyes, but her eyes had gone long ago. When separated from the ship she looked at the world through two lenses of luminous green crystal. More data scrolled across her vision. The enemy ship was close, bearing down on them like a jackal on a wounded animal.

  I am going to lose you, the thought echoed through her mind. I should not have left you. I am sorry. I am sorry. I am weak. I deserve this.

  Another part of her mind, a part that still ran with mechanical coolness, processed the data. The attacker was moving into boarding range. Their troops would be inside the hull within twenty-eight minutes.

  I must get to the bridge. She extended the mechadendrites from her back and clawed her way up the passage wall until she was standing. The cybernetic tentacles whined as she steadied herself. Something warm and wet was running down the flesh of her neck. She brought her brass hand up and ran it across her skin. Sensors in her fingers tasted the liquid: blood and oil. She moved her hand up, and found the crack running down the red lacquered ceramic of her right cheek. She felt no pain, but then the nerves in what remained of her face were long dead. This is how a half-machine must weep, she thought.

  She took a breath, the air sucking into her lungs with a clicking of clockwork. It was an old flesh-bound habit, a sign that she was tired. She was tired, tired of running, tired of the life of an outcast. It had not been a good life. Too many lies and betrayals had marked her path. Part of her wanted to shut down, to let the ship die, and herself with it. She shut the thought down instead, with a snarl of anger.

  You will not kill us, she shouted to herself. You will not end this, not now. You will not take her from me.

  She dropped her hands and took an unsteady step. Sharp pain ran up her spine. She felt so tired, and a dull grey cloud was choking her senses. She had to keep moving, she had to reach the bridge. For a second she wondered where Astraeos was. She had tried to raise him but the comms link had failed. It was irrelevant anyway; if the enemy got aboard, four Space Marines would not be enough.

  Slowly Carmenta began to limp down the passage, her ragged black robe trailing in her wake.

  Ahzek Ahriman watched from the Blood Crescent’s bridge as scabs of cooling armour peeled away from the silent ship’s hull. The image flickered on the cracked screen, before snapping back into focus. Dozens more screens hung beside it, each showing an equally imperfect picture of the ship they were closing on. The screens gave almost the only light on the bridge, making the vast vaulted space seem small, like a cave shrunk to the sphere of light cast by a single fire. A curtain of bruise-coloured gas clouds hung across darkness in the background of each screen, and a black rift ran through those clouds like a slit pupil in a snake’s eye. The stars around its edge shone with a dimmed, angry light. As he watched the ship, he could not help but feel his eyes drawn to stare into that gulf that hung in the distance. Many had given it names, but only one persisted: the Eye of Terror.

  They had found the ship by chance on the edge of an uncharted system, the energy of the warp still clinging to its hull. They had been cautious at first and fired a long-range salvo into the silent ship’s flank. No answering salvo had come, no shields had ignited, and the ship’s engines had remained cool. She was a warrior, a six-kilometre-long finger of granite and steel. Gun batteries nested along her flanks and jutted from her spine. But her guns had remained silent, as if she had lost the will to fight. The ship was alive, though; the Blood Crescent’s sensors could see the brightness of her reactors still beating within her hull. They had fired one more salvo before they approached. No reply had come, and the Harrowing’s hunger for the kill had begun to grow.

  Machine-rigged beasts bellowed as they walked up and down the lines of slaves chained to the ship’s control systems. Here and there Space Marines of the Harrowing clustered in circles around spiked altars raised in crude iron from the bridge’s floor. They called themselves ‘initiates’, as if they had gained something by their allegiance to savagery. They were a mongrel force, the colours of a dozen forsaken identities lost under flaking layers of rust and dried blood. Strings of human teeth and finger bones rattled against their armour as they moved in time with their growled chants.

  Blood pooled on the deck in places, a
nd he heard the screams as the Harrowing impaled sacrifices on their iron altars. A few paces in front of him, Ahriman noticed one of the initiates grinning in anticipation. The Space Marine had iron hooks for teeth. The other initiates started to howl. Once, Ahriman would have felt sickened by what these Space Marines had become. Now, watching them, he felt nothing. Was he so different after all? Was he any less of a slave and betrayer than they were?

  ‘Horkos.’ The word pulled Ahriman from his thoughts. The voice was deep, a gut-rumbling purr edged with contempt. It fitted the speaker perfectly. As Ahriman looked up, he saw Gzrel stalking towards him. The lord of the Harrowing clicked and wheezed with every step, and his face was a dry mask of skin sunk into the collar of his rust-red armour. The noise on the bridge grew as the Harrowing shouted their lord’s name.

  Behind Gzrel came his court. He liked to collect sorcerers, weighing and valuing them as others might jewels. There was Xiatsis in his mirror-fronted helm; Cottadaron, his body and armour so melded that he shambled; and, of course, Maroth. The Harrowing’s self-styled soothsayer gave a lipless smile as his hands stroked the flayed skin covering his chestplate. Maroth was Gzrel’s High Magister, a title that might once have made Ahriman laugh at the presumption. There was, however, nothing amusing about Maroth.

  Ahriman knelt as Gzrel halted in front of him. His armour ground and hissed as he bent his knees. It, like everything else, fitted what he had become. Studded pauldrons covered his shoulders and a mottled grey tabard hung from his torso. He held a beak-snouted helm in the crook of his arm, its surface scorched black. He had taken it, still smoking, from a burned corpse, and never repainted it. In the Imperium that mark of helm had a designation: Corvus, the crow. A black crow helm for a carrion warrior, he had thought when he first held it in his hand. It was the only piece of symbolism he allowed himself, and only then to remind him of what he had been and what he had become.