Konrad Curze the Night Haunter - Guy Haley Read online

  If only he had had the strength, could he have been like the Angel? Once, Curze had told his brother all that separated them was the accident of the planets they were cast away upon. But doubt nibbled at him. Would Baal Secundus have feared a daemon of the deep desert? Would Nostramo have enjoyed an angelic saviour?

  ‘No,’ Curze shook his head. ‘He would have died, gutted, blinded, his wings plucked bare. He could not have survived what I did!’

  Your brother Guilliman said justice is not enough.

  Curze came alert, and looked around himself. The thought was not his own, but it came from no outward source, as far as he could tell.

  Mercy is the necessary adjunct to justice, the thought continued. Without mercy, justice is hard and cruel. Amoral.

  ‘Justice is hard and cruel and I am hard and cruel!’ he snarled accusingly at the figure. ‘That is what I am. I can be no other way.’

  Is that really true?

  He stared at the figure. He could not say if the voice was his own or if the figure had spoken.

  He fell into a sulk. His convictions had not been lessened by the Angel’s insistence of fate’s mutability, but they had been undermined. Sanguinius’ words troubled him anew.

  ‘Mercy is a luxury,’ Curze muttered to himself. ‘Justice must be unbending. Justice is necessary to the rule of law,’ he explained plaintively. ‘Humans are beasts, incapable of following laws. They try to subvert their own laws at every turn, to remove themselves from the constraints they place upon others. Individuals lie or buy their way out, convinced that they and they alone are special, and beyond the rules that must govern everyone but themselves. They need fear to obey. They need to be taught lessons of pain to learn that they are all accountable. All of them!’ he snapped. His shoulders shook, quivering his ragged cloak. ‘There can be no justice without fear, no fear without suffering,’ he said. He refrained from putting his doubts to his father – he was there to make the opposite case – but the more he attempted to convince the figure of his rightness, the more the doubt gnawed at him, and that angered him. This was supposed to be his valediction!

  Chance broke the gyre of thoughts before they turned again. A slave was coming to the chamber. Curze heard his faltering footsteps long before a mortal man would. They were as clear to him as the reports of artillery, though they padded feather light on the mosaics of human teeth far down the corridor behind the doors. He came alone. The corridor was long, but not so long that Curze’s preternatural senses could not hear everything that occurred within. His bastard sons had not even escorted their messenger as far as the entrance. Cowards.

  Presently, a tremulous knock sounded.

  The door was a heavy thing, made of molecularly bonded bone. The work had been painstaking, and most entertaining to watch. A gang of miserable artisans, assured that at least one would survive, cleaned, shaped and placed the bones for welding by their fellows. When supplies ran out, one of their number was chosen by lot, and dismembered alive in front of the rest, and his bones boiled and cleaned and passed on to the others to continue the work. Curze salivated at the memory of their fear scent. The last had been sent back to the slave caverns, rewarded with fresh brands, his mind broken, though not so broken he could not convey new sermons upon the wickedness of humanity to the others. Thus the gospel of Curze was spread.

  ‘Enter!’ growled the Night Haunter.

  The door swung soundlessly open until it caught upon a steak of thigh, whereupon it jammed with a soft squelch. A little light came through, and a human male bearing a single candle shuffled around the door’s immense edge, a child lost in an ogre’s castle.

  He placed his light carefully aside and threw himself face down to the floor, so terrified he had to swallow three times before he was able to speak.

  ‘My… my lord. The captains of the Eighth Legion wish to know when you will emerge from your chamber. The hour is late. The appointed time draws near. They wish to speak with you, and dissuade you from your course if they can.’

  Night Haunter imagined how the mortal must see the room: the charnel stink, the heaps of flensed limbs, the figure welded by frozen blood to the throne, and most petrifying of all, the Night Haunter himself, squatted upon the remains of men, his retinas silvered by the candlelight. He stared at the man until he squirmed.

  ‘Those are not your words,’ he said.

  ‘No, my lord,’ the slave was shaking all over. Curze listened a moment to the rodent pounding of his heart.

  ‘Look at me,’ said Curze.

  Shaking violently, the slave obeyed.

  ‘Are you frightened, little man?’ said Curze.

  The slave nodded. Of course he was frightened. The man’s terror seeped out of every pore, spiking the heavy, bloody smell of the room.

  ‘My sons are frightened too. That is why they sent you. And they shall know no fear!’ he said mockingly. ‘How enormously amusing. The downfall of my Legion is complete. They are not worthy of my contempt. I am ashamed of my sons, slave, and I apologise to you for their cravenness, sincerely.’ He cupped his hands over his heart. ‘Tell them I said so. Tell them that any one of them that lays a finger on you will answer to me. Tell Sevatar to convey my anger at the nature of this interruption to the others. He will do it properly. Heads will roll!’

  ‘Sevatar?’ the man looked up in confusion. He did not know the name.

  ‘Yes, Sevatar! My First Captain!’ Curze leaned down. ‘Oh you brave, poor man,’ he said sympathetically. ‘How could you forget your lord? My finest son. Now go. Tell them to grow stiffer spines, or I shall remove the ones they have.’

  ‘I… I may go?’ said the slave.

  ‘Of course you may go!’ said Curze. He laughed, a stepped rise in pitch climbing all the way to the heights of hysteria. The slave flinched.

  ‘Go on then, run along!’ Curze shooed him jocularly.

  Not believing his luck, the slave bowed several times as he backed himself towards the door, careful not to tread on the glistening remains littering the chamber floor.

  ‘Wait!’ said Curze. He scuttled forwards on all fours to the feet of his father-puppet. A lizard’s tongue flicked over lizard’s teeth. A bead of blood welled on the tip where it stroked an edge as sharp as a flake of flint. Curze sucked it down absent-mindedly. ‘There is one service you can perform for me before you leave…’

  FOUR

  FUTURE IMPERFECT

  Blood steamed. Curze was back upon his mounded cushions of meat, the slave’s heart gripped daintily between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘I’ve forgotten what I was talking about,’ he growled. He bit hard. The slave’s heart crunched like an apple. Dark blood spurted from the ragged aorta, splattering upon the floor where it froze atop the vitae already there. Curze worried at the tough muscle before it gave up a morsel of flesh. He gestured with the organ.

  ‘No matter,’ he said around the meat. ‘There are many things I need to tell you. Fate, and how we must follow it. The future is set,’ he said. ‘You knew. You knew that the Imperium was doomed. I don’t know why you tried at all. It was a fool’s dream, and we awoke to nightmare.’ He spoke through bloody mouthfuls. ‘You are like me, father, you see clearly. Sanguinius too, though he is as deluded as you are. When you see the world as we do, how can you possibly put trust in human nature? It is dark, and bleak, and wholly without merit. I have seen deep into their hearts and into their futures. There are only shadows there. You gave me this gift of foresight. Why did you not discuss it with me, or the others? Why did you not explain? Why must we suffer so much?’

  Soft rains caressed him, tracing meandering, translucent lines over marmoreal skin. Cold when condensed from the sky, the fall through layers of industrial heat between the spires fed warmth to every drop, so when the rain hit the young transhuman sprawled upon the asphalt roof it was the temperature of tears.

  They called him the Night Haunter. He had another name, chosen the moment he was created, but the one who would bestow it
on him was as yet an indistinct presentiment, and the name mere apprehension. So Night Haunter was what he called himself, too. An object of terror before he was fully grown. Right then, the legend would not have survived contact with the reality of him. He was weary from the long chase, and had not eaten for four days. His shoulder ached where a pair of slugs were embedded in his flesh. The Night Haunter’s differences to the human creatures he dwelled among were manifold, and not limited to his rapid regenerative powers, but they were among the most remarkable of his abilities. He’d taken the hits in the grainy grey morning. Skin had already formed over the gunshot wounds, sealing the bullets within his body.

  He preferred lasers. They had no bullets that needed digging out. They did not carry fragments of the filthy robes he wore inside his body. Already the faint heat of infection flared around the injuries. Night Haunter was unworried; no infection could harm him, he knew this instinctively as he knew so many other things. Still, it was annoying.

  That was another difference, that the others did not simply know things; they had to learn. It had been a surprise to discover this, though quickly assimilated, and the surprise forgotten.

  The bullets were painful. Even his physiology could not dissolve solid carbon. They ground upon the bone of his shoulder blade painfully, and would continue to do so until prised free.

  For a few moments he rested, lying face up on the rough dampness of the asphalt. Rain filled the hollows of his eyes, blurring the view, before running down his face.

  This is how it feels to weep, he thought.

  He had never wept.

  Spire-sides reached for the churning, ever-present clouds. A hundred thousand lights shone from their rockcrete skins: apartment windows, advertising hololiths and low-yield laser displays that flicker-painted brand names onto the falling rain. No amount of illumination could drive back Nostramo’s darkness. The sun shone somewhere on the far side of the cloud barrier. He had never seen it. No education but innate knowledge told him the sun was there, and that it was unusually weak, but that beyond the boiling purple and black of the cloud layer were trillions of stars, each with their own daughter worlds bathing in their light.

  He did not question how he knew these things, just as he did not question how he knew that the bullets had to come out. It was immutable fact. Remove them, or suffer compromise to his ability to kill.

  Relaxed now, he closed his black eyes and let his mind run ahead of the moment, his thoughts tap-tapping at the strands of probability, awaiting a returning quiver of truth. There were many futures, but only one that would come true. The true line had a particular feel. The others were illusions. He rarely saw what would happen exactly. Most often he felt things: a foreboding, an urge to move on, a shudder, a coldness. Never joy. There was no joy.

  He opened his eyes. He was safe for now. He knew with absolute certainty that his pursuers had lost him, and would not pick up the trail for some time. When they did, he would be waiting.

  Before that happened, the bullets had to come out.

  He got to all fours, and bounded across the roof, feet and hands splashing in puddles scented with pollutants. On the far side was a lamp pole topped with a single, incandescent bulb. Within its circle of wan light was a shelter, which housed a stairhead leading to the lower floors. An array of air purifiers around the stairhead sucked in dirty air, forced it through filters and hooted it down pipes into the building. He did not go there for the light – he could see in near perfect dark – but for the noise of the filtration system. Though he doubted he would cry out when he removed the bullets, he could not guarantee it. He was adaptable, reckless or cautious as the occasion demanded; now was a moment for caution.

  He hid himself between the machines and the rickety shelter, squatting, shuffling his limbs about to give his arm the longest reach, and groped over his shoulder.

  There was no hesitation. He plunged his talons into himself without a second thought. He gritted his teeth as his ragged nails bit into the skin. A soft grunt escaped his lips.

  The first bullet was easily found. Pain stung him as he dug about in the muscle, noting as he did the knots formed in the fibres by their healing over the slug. Wedging his fingernail under the bullet, he turned his hand palm up, and flicked it out.

  It pinged onto the mesh covering of the purifiers, fell through, and rattled about in the machine’s innards down into the building.

  He paused, alert. Warm rain ran with warmer blood.

  Nothing. Nobody heard, or nobody cared. Fear kept most people from investigating strange noises. Firstly fear of gang members, lately fear of him.

  The second bullet was buried outside comfortable reach. He grunted with frustration, twisting, and turned his arm, forcing his elbow down with his free hand as he scrabbled about in his bleeding flesh. His nails brushed the bullet, causing it to slip about in the wound. The pain he could bear. The annoyance was more than he could take. Three times he got the tip of his forefinger nail into a nick in the metal before it slipped away, the movements of his body sucking it back in. Each near excision was a moment of frustration, punctuated by a tugging pain.

  He let out a strangled cry of frustration. Finally, he caught the bullet, pulled it out, and dropped it onto the roof. Black blood swirled in the skin of standing water. He fished about a little more for the threads of cloth driven into his muscle; these came easily, the hurt they gave as he pulled them out perversely satisfying.

  Finished, he leaned his head back onto the shelter, and with his hands crossed over his lap, allowed himself to sleep.

  The day was a little brighter than the night. A certain flatness took hold in the mornings. At noon, on days when the clouds were thinnest, a broad, pale patch sometimes appeared in the sky where the sun guttered. Otherwise everything always appeared the same – the dark, the advertisements, the dwelling lights, the rumble of traffic. The change in light was infinitesimal, invisible to everyone but him, and the brightest day was never lighter than a cloudy midnight on ancient Earth. It was, however, enough for him to judge the passage of time. When he woke it was morning. He had slept for several hours.

  A noise in the alleyway drew his attention. The permanent heaps of garbage that choked Nostramo Quintus’ lesser thoroughfares made it difficult to move quietly. Someone was trying, and failing, to be stealthy.

  He rotated his shoulder. Better. The wound had healed again and the muscles ran smoothly. The heat of infection was gone. The scab was already coming off. Soon the injury would be a scar, and soon after, not even that.

  He crept towards the lip of the roof, and peered into the alleyway.

  The building was a tenement of ancient design. An older Night Haunter would have recognised the prefabricated sections as STC prints. He did not know that it had stood there for ages, the durable material barely showing the passage of millennia. It had been built upon a hillside in forgotten centuries, one of several dozen gradually swallowed by the hive. The ground was too unstable to support anything larger, and so they had not been demolished but remained while the area became a seedy district hemmed in by starscrapers. The perfect hunting ground.

  Two youths were in the alleyway, knives out, looming over a young female, about to do what heartless young males did to women a thousand times an hour in the grim confines of the hive. They were street dregs, parentless and murderous. She was better dressed than they, of a higher caste. Whichever syndicate sheltered her people would seek these youths out and slaughter them for their temerity. It would not come to that.

  They were too busy cutting the clothes from their victim to see Night Haunter drop from the roof behind them. Ragged wings of cloth fluttered enough to give them warning, if they were vigilant. They were not. They were too occupied with their sordid pleasure to pay attention to the soft footfall of his landing, or the padding of his feet as he crept towards them, his hunched, cloaked form a darker shadow among the shadows.

  Their blood was up and they were laughing. The girl wept softly. Th
ey were loud and she was quiet because both parties assumed no one would come to her aid.

  The Night Haunter was close enough to smell the youths’ unwashed bodies over the pervasive garbage stink.

  ‘Let her go,’ said the Night Haunter.

  The Night Haunter knew many things, including dozens of languages he had never heard. But Nostraman he’d had to learn. In later life he would appreciate it as a language of a rare sort, so far evolved it no longer resembled the universal tongue mankind had taken to the stars from Old Earth. It had become soft, crammed with rushing sibilants. Its users favoured poetic metaphor over directness of expression, a romantic sensibility evolved to cover the pitilessness of its speakers.

  One of the first expressions in Nostraman he had learned was his name.

  ‘Night Haunter!’

  They turned to face him. Though Night Haunter was not yet fully grown, he towered over them, an apparition clad in midnight, flesh so pale it seemed to glow in the gaps of his ragged cloak.

  One boy’s bladder betrayed him, and the spoiled citrus tang of urine joined the heady melange of alley scents. The other was braver. He clenched his teeth and lunged with a knife ground out of scrap.

  ‘You die first,’ said the Night Haunter.

  The young primarch wrapped long, strangling fingers around the youth’s head, lifted him up, and with a quick flick of his wrist snapped his neck. The corpse danced a marionette’s jig on wires of misfiring nerves.

  Night Haunter smiled at the second boy, whose effusion of fluids extended now to snot and tears. The boy blinked big black eyes up at the Night Haunter. Seized utterly by terror, the child he was emerged from behind the mask of the thug.

  The monster hissed one quiet word through perfect teeth.

  ‘Run.’

  The boy stumbled over refuse on trembling legs, slamming into walls. He picked up speed as he regained control of his body. The sounds of his flight merged into the background hum of the city.