Konrad Curze the Night Haunter - Guy Haley Read online

  When the light faded, shapes in heavy Cataphractii battleplate were suddenly there, moving lightning-fast, and the psyker was distracted. The ethereal wind faltered, and it was enough for the closest warrior to sweep in and take the kill that was the primarch’s due.

  A manreaper blade – a sibling weapon to those held by his Deathshroud – cut the psyker in half with a diagonal downward stroke. Bloody segments tumbled to the floor, the brief enclosed storm dying as suddenly as its creator.

  Mortarion glowered at the new arrivals, feeling the still-fading crackle of a teleport effect in the close, dense air of the chamber. He instinctively knew whose face he would see before the lead figure stepped into the light. ‘Calas.’

  Typhon, First Captain of the Death Guard, saluted with his bloody scythe and bowed as well as he could in his heavy armour. ‘My Lord Mortarion. Well met.’

  Mortarion refused to answer the ritual hail. ‘Those are your ships up there.’ He walked over to the reproduction throne, not waiting for a confirmation. The floating tank and the brain of the planetary governor within it was babbling a stream of panicked words, as Morarg and the Deathshroud set about executing any retainers in the chamber who were still alive. Without halting to listen to what was being said, Mortarion punched through the tank and crushed the organ inside to paste, before angrily tossing the remains away. ‘You chose this moment to show your face again.’

  ‘It was opportune,’ Typhon offered, nodding at the dead psyker.

  ‘The psyker didn’t see you coming.’

  ‘No.’ The First Captain smiled slightly, and Mortarion saw his teeth had yellowed, his skin drawn, as if he had been recent victim to a powerful malaise. ‘You know I have gifts. Stealth is one of them.’

  The primarch scowled at the suggestion behind those words. The witchery he so detested ran strong in Typhon’s blood, a legacy that his First Captain had refused to completely eschew, much to Mortarion’s displeasure. ‘Why return to us now? You broke away from the Legion, took your own fleet to seek… What? Answers?’

  ‘You have sought me, have you not?’ Typhon took a step closer, deflecting the question with one of his own. ‘And it is time, my lord. It is time for the Death Guard to be united in full once more. The final day is almost upon us, and we must be ready.’

  Mortarion’s irritation deepened. He had no patience for those who spoke in vagaries, and would not tolerate it among his commanders. ‘Speak plainly or not at all,’ he demanded. ‘Why did you come back?’

  ‘I have the answers I want,’ Typhon replied. ‘I would have come back, even without the orders.’

  ‘What orders?’ The primarch eyed him.

  Typhon gave a nod, the smile widening, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘The Warmaster calls us to the greatest battle, my lord. The invasion of Terra will soon begin.’

  Typhon felt the citadel’s end rumble through the black ground beneath his feet, and watched the fortress crumble with a jaundiced eye. The great construct’s sad destruction put him in mind of a dying man, slumping and collapsing in on itself as the earth it stood on gave way.

  Geoformer charges left behind by Legion Tactical Support squads fired in concussive sequence, blasting apart the supporting structures that had held up the citadel for thousands of years. The tower sank into a roiling stir of heavy dust, disappearing through the thick mantle to fall into the magmatic underground lake beneath it. The final act was the ejection of a column of dark ash and superheated steam – the last, fading grave marker for the rulers of Ynyx.

  A sombre wind brought him the sound of distant thrusters. Looking up, Typhon spotted the metallic darts of Stormbirds racing away before vanishing into the low, foul clouds. Mortarion had dispatched search teams to conduct a final sweep over the planet’s surface, just to be certain all life upon it had been expunged. But Typhon felt the certainty in his dark and tainted blood. Nothing lived on this world but the forces of the XIV Legion. Every settlement and city was a mouldering heap of corpses, the dead discarded and decaying.

  A perfect garden of death from which new things will be born, he told himself. Typhon turned his gauntlet over, absently studying the pattern of the plates across his palm and his fingers. A tiny speck emerged from one of the knuckle joints – a black-silver fly with an oily body – and he watched it take flight and buzz away.

  Behind him, heavy boots crunched on the ebon sand, and he turned, half bowing as his primarch approached.

  Mortarion gave him a dismissive, irritable gesture. ‘Stop. Do not bow and scrape.’ Unhooded now, his gaunt aspect remained set in its accustomed scowl. ‘I seek truth, not obeisance.’

  Typhon was aware of the Deathshroud standing at their full permitted distance of forty-nine paces, away on the rise of the black basalt dunes. Mortarion would have ordered them to stay back, he guessed, so as to keep what was spoken of between the primarch and the First Captain private.

  ‘Much has changed since we parted ways, brother.’ Typhon dared to be informal with his Legion master, knowing that to do so would summon memories of their shared past. ‘I tell you with all honesty that when the Warmaster declared his insurrection, I was uncertain of the path I should take.’ He saw Mortarion’s eyebrow rise questioningly, and headed off his primarch’s train of thought before he could voice it. ‘I do not speak of holding Terra’s banner. I mean my path.’ Typhon beat a fist against his chest-plate, above the site of his primary heart. ‘I broke away because I needed that distance to see clearly.’

  At the edges of his vision, Typhon glimpsed the now familiar black-silver flicker of insect wings, and in the deep registers of his hearing he sensed the drone of invisible flies. His primarch remained oblivious to them, but they comforted Typhon, in their own way. He held back a smile. There was so much he wanted to share with Mortarion, so many things he needed to say.

  I was right all along. I promised you, and I was right.

  But it was too soon. He needed only to study the face of his liege lord to know that the time was not at hand. The moment was close, though, closer than it had ever been before. The embrace would come when due. Nothing could stop that from happening.

  Mortarion’s gaze suddenly flicked up, as if he had seen something hidden to all other observers. His eyes narrowed.

  Does he sense it? Typhon pulled at the question. Can he hear it too? The coming change…

  Perhaps he did, even if he could not articulate it. Typhon could taste the psychic stain in the air around the primarch, the spoor left behind by his deliberate contact with the warp. For all Mortarion’s hatred of the immaterium and the forces that swam in its depths, he had willingly exposed himself to such powers. Typhon had talked to chattering messenger-monsters in ghostly unplaces, heard them speak of how the Reaper of Men had defied his own revulsion to satiate his desire for knowledge.

  Horus Lupercal’s bloody schism had changed so much in its wake, from the great to the small. Typhon wondered if Mortarion would ever have dared to walk in the shallows of the Formless Seas, if his brother had not first broken the unbreakable faith of the Legions in so shattering a manner.

  Mortarion was on the cusp, ready to be guided over the edge, even if he was not aware of it. Typhon knew of the primarch’s fateful conversation with Lermenta, the mantis-crone the Death Guard had taken on Terathalion, and his wild success binding the daemon-tied essence of that braggart Ignatius Grulgor.

  The latter was a challenge that few would have been able to accomplish with such scant experience, and yet Typhon’s liege lord had managed it with the barest knowledge of the ways of witchery. Given the mercurial and wicked manners of the Ruinous Powers, Typhon had to wonder if they had eased the path for Grulgor’s capture, deliberately pitching the act against Mortarion’s hatred of them.

  The more he loathes them, the sweeter his assimilation will taste, thought Typhon. But the path to the fall was not flowing as it should have. He should have used the Eater of Life on this wretched ball of dust. It was the ideal weapon.

/>   Erebus had told him as much. Speaking through his ruin of a face, the Word Bearers legionary had promised it. Erebus told Typhon that he would return to his Legion and find them willing and ready to take the Cups. To drink deep of the new way.

  But Mortarion – stubborn and unyielding in all things – resisted the inevitable, as he always did.

  ‘And now you come back,’ the primarch was saying, ‘and all is forgiven?’

  ‘I will submit myself to any censure you deem fit,’ Typhon replied, inclining his head. ‘I only ask that you delay such judgement until we can regroup for the mission ahead.’

  ‘Yes.’ Mortarion glanced away again, towards the rest of his forces mustering in the blasted wasteland. ‘The mission. Morarg brought me word from the Endurance that confirms what you said. The Warmaster wishes us to unite for the final invasion.’ He paused, his frown deepening. ‘His twisted equerry, Maloghurst, told me that we would be the first to attack the walls of the Imperial Palace. My brother, it seems, was unwilling to give me that command in person.’ Typhon sensed irritation in his words. ‘Did you speak to him?’

  Typhon shook his head, again seeing Erebus’ torn aspect in his recollection. ‘No, only an emissary.’ The First Captain did not mention what else the Word Bearers legionary had given him – a velvet bag of hololithic diamonds encoded with dense fields of encrypted data. One of the gemstones was in an equipment pouch on his hip, and his hand strayed towards it. The others were already in the process of being secretly distributed throughout the command ships of the Death Guard flotilla. They were, in their own way, utterly priceless.

  ‘The home world…’ said Mortarion, pausing again to frame his words. ‘Barbarus. You are aware?’

  Typhon nodded. ‘It is no more.’ He had been thinking on this moment ever since Erebus had told him of the planet’s destruction, and now it was here, the First Captain did not know what face to wear before his commander. Should he be morose over the loss of that blighted sphere? Furious? Or coldly dismissive? He was unsure which expression would be best suited to mimic Mortarion’s thoughts.

  ‘The Dark Angels destroyed it to punish us,’ Mortarion went on. ‘I should hate them all the more for this deed but I cannot.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I have always detested the Sons of Caliban. The chasm of my enmity is as deep as it ever was.’ His tone was level, distant. ‘They will pay along with the others.’

  Typhon decided to keep his own counsel with regard to his recent contact with factions of the Lion’s Legion on Zaramund. If he spoke of it now, it would only cloud matters, and the First Captain’s Grave Wardens knew better than to volunteer the information. ‘Barbarus was our cradle, brother,’ offered Typhon. ‘Aye, the Death Guard were born there, but we were always meant to abandon it.’ He let his gaze drop, to appear sorrowful. ‘We passed beyond it long ago. We left behind our errant fathers and eclipsed them.’

  The primarch nodded once. ‘This is truth. You have always cut to the core of things, Typhon. But there are many among my sons who do not share your… clarity.’

  ‘Of course.’ He had no doubt that amid the rank and file, there were Barbarun-born legionaries whose rage was stoked high by the thought of that hell-world cracking beneath a bombardment of planet-killers. There would be the need for revenge against the First Legion, and calls both private and public to find the Dark Angels and punish them. Once, Typhon reflected, he would have been shouting loudest among those voices, but not any more. On Zaramund, he had finally found the perspective that had been beyond him for so long.

  The mission before Typhon was far more important than the fate of one toxic cloud-wreathed world and its populace of primitive mud farmers. The future of the Death Guard, and their role in the galaxy’s savage destiny was at stake. The two things were so unlike in significance that they could not even share the same scale.

  ‘I say this,’ Typhon went on. ‘If it is bloody vengeance that is required, then there is one certain place where we will have it. Terra.’

  Mortarion gave a grunt of reluctant agreement. ‘The Lion’s whelps will be there, if they do not hold their honour cheap. We shall trample them upon my father’s doorstep. It will be a fitting end for the First.’

  Typhon smiled slightly. ‘When he has the Golden Throne, we can bid Horus to give us Caliban… and then take our payment from it, over centuries if we see fit.’

  ‘Yes.’ The primarch’s head bobbed. That was the kind of justice that appealed to Mortarion, the kind that only someone who had been hated and rejected could espouse. Typhon knew this truth because he shared it. Not for the first time, he reflected on how alike the two of them were. Shared pain, shared hate, he thought. In that, we both spring from the same dark well.

  He had to restrain the smile on his lips from growing any wider. It was going to work – it was all going to work, and Typhon would be at the centre of it.

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